|
What are they? They are tiny white worms that look like threads of cotton. They live in your gut near your appendix. They come in two sexes – the ‘hers’ are bigger than the ‘hims’ – 13mm compared with 5mm and with a diameter of 0.5 mm compared with 0.2 mm. The poor old pregnant female worm is really just made up of two huge wombs ready to spill out, whilst all the male has for himself is a curly tail. The female creeps out at night to lay her eggs (which are too small to see) on the skin around your bum, which is why you get itchy there.
Who gets them? Nobody is spared and up to one in three children have threadworms at any one time, even if they don’t know they have them! Adults get them too, and once one person in the family has them, then the rest are very likely to have them.
|
