♬♬♬ I Love You...You Love Me...We are One Big Happy Parasitic Family ♬♬♬

I have been in France for a few weeks now and have been enjoying many of the Paris sites.

And, as it turns out, the parasites have been enjoying me as well.

Sorry, that was a horribly bad joke, but I hope you got the point...I have been attacked by parasites!

That is a bit dramatic. The parasites didn't really attack, but they did certainly move in. And not only did they moved in. They had babies!

A few nights ago, I stepped on something hard on the bathroom floor. At least it felt hard. There actually wasn't anything on the floor. There was something in my foot though. I looked at the bottom of my foot and there was a big round bump with a hard black dot inside. I thought it was probably just an old splinter.

I got a pair of toenail clippers to cut it open and remove the splinter. When I did, I was in for a big surprise. There was no splinter, but there were lots and lots of eggs!

Tiny, tiny white eggs and plus some puss and blood and other gooey icky things. It didn't really hurt, but it was a bit weird. There shouldn't be eggs in my foot. Where did they come from? Who did they come from?

Well, I still don't know. I did my best to get rid of all the eggs. None of them hatched, so I didn't get to see what they would turn into. They are most likely some sort of parasitic worm. A bit like the caterpillar and wasp story a few posts ago.

Creepy, I know. Some worms like to live in humans. Sometimes they crawl into your feet and sometimes they get into your body some other way like sneaking in with a mosquito. They live in the mosquito and when the mosquito bites you it rushes out of the mosquito's mouth and into your blood. When it is older and is ready to have babies, it wriggles its way under your skin or through your blood until it reaches the bottom of your foot. It lays eggs. The eggs hatch and leave your foot for better places.

But every parasitic worm is different. Some live and grow inside of you until you become very sick or even die. Some live inside of you and don't hurt you at all. And some live inside of you and actually help you. Yeah, thank you parasites!

Parasites are all over, in and through you. Right now there is an army of billions and trillions of bacteria, worms, viruses and mites that calls you home.

Don't freak out. It's not really a bad thing. If they all took a vacation it would be bad though. You would get very sick. Your body needs that tiny army to keep it healthy.

In America, most people don't get the really bad parasites. The nasty parasites like to move from person to person in dirty water and disgusting mud. Where you live, you drink clean water, you wash your clothes and bodies in fresh water, and you go to the bathroom in sparkling bright little rooms.

In Madagascar, and other very poor countries, people don't have clean water to drink and wash with. And there aren't bathrooms like yours. This means that the nasty parasites are happy and healthy, but the people sometimes are not.

My parasites didn't seem to be too bad. My foot feels fine now and all seems to be good.

So, when you go to sleep tonight, don't forget to tell your trillions of tiny friends thanks for keeping you nice and healthy. And they will thank you for being such a nice warm home.

*If you want a fancy science word for two living things helping each other out, you're in luck. It's called mutualism.

Three of the tiny, tiny eggs. You would need about 8 to make 1 grain of rice.

This is one of the bad parasites. It is found mostly in Africa and it is passed along from unclean drinking water. To remove it you have to slowly wrap it around a stick until it comes out. Be patient. It might take a while; the worm can be 3 feet long! [Photo from www.fiveoclockbot.com]

This is one of the worst parasites. It causes Lymphatic filariasis. About 12o million people in about 80 different countries suffer from the parasite. [Photo from NY Times]