A giant tapeworm measuring 20 feet long has been discovered by doctors after it was excreted by a Chinese man who had complained of stomach aches. The Daily Mail reports: The 38-year-old had gone to hospital after three days of vomiting and feeling weak. There, he told doctors that over the past two years he had suffered from pain in his stomach and abdomen, loss of appetite, weight loss and long-term anaemia due to iron deficiency. Medics from the Hubei University of Medicine, in Shiyan, China, examined him but found ‘nothing remarkable’, the New England Journal of Medicine reports. But when they looked at his stools under a microscope they found an oncosphere – the egg of a tapeworm. The man revealed he had a tendency to eat raw beef, which is a known cause of infection with such worms. Doctors immediately gave him the drug praziquantel, which is used to treat parasitic infections. He also drank mannitol, a colourless sweet-tasting crystalline alcohol, as a laxative. Two-and-a-half hours later he excreted a tapeworm that was more than 6.2m in length. A tapeworm is a parasite that can live in a person’s bowel. It tends to be flat, segmented and ribbon-like. Humans [...]