“Hello we are based in New Zealand and have had problems with a type of parasite, but we don’t know what it is”, states this reader about the black, spiky organisms pictured below. “We have already gone to medical professionals. We are deemed crazy yet have got multiple photos and samples. Our family has been affected by this too, leading to their skin rashing/scabbing up, and it is very painful. Would All About Worms know anything or would they be able to help us? Thanks heaps.”

To answer our reader’s first question, we would unfortunately not be able to say anything about this organism so far as identifying it. This is because, since our reader has explicitly stated that it is a parasite, this situation is clearly medical in nature. Since we are not medical professionals, we are neither qualified nor legally able to identify organisms that pose a health threat: parasites fall into this category. That said, we can help our reader so far as pointing her in the direction of medical professionals who are qualified to diagnose and treat parasitic infections.

We specifically recommend that our reader consult a medical parasitologist, as they specialize in the area of parasitic infections, and so will take our reader seriously. We assume that the medical professionals she has consulted already were not medical parasitologists, and this is usually the case for physicians that do not specialize in that area. For instance, most primary care doctors do not receive training in parasitology. Of course, that is no excuse for calling one’s patients crazy, and this is not the first time we have heard from a reader that they were deemed crazy by their doctor when they went to them with concerns about parasites.

Now, while we are a U.S. based organization, and so some of the following resources are U.S. based, we imagine that if our reader contacts them they could still be of help; also our reader could ask them if they are familiar with any counterparts where our reader is located. What we can recommend is that our reader do one or more of the following:
1) Search for a medical parasitologist in New Zealand using this directory of medical parasitology consultants: https://www.astmh.org/for-astmh-members/clinical-consultants-directory.
2) Search for a local parasitologist by doing a Google search for “medical parasitologist (name of the closest big city)” or “tropical medicine specialist (name of the closest big city)”.
3) Get in touch with Dr. Omar Amin at the Parasitology Center at https://www.parasitetesting.com.

To conclude, it is unfortunate that we are not able to identify the organisms our reader is dealing with, but we hope that the help we were able to provide proves useful, and that she gets the help she wants soon. We wish her and her family the very best!

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