OP-ED: All We Are Saying is Give Tapeworms a Chance - Daily Maverick

OP-ED: All We Are Saying is Give Tapeworms a Chance - Daily Maverick
Potentially deadly tapeworm can affect dogs and humans alike - TheSpec.com
'If you cross your eyes, they'll get stuck like that' and other white lies parents tell their kids - Omaha World-Herald

Posted: 29 Apr 2019 04:44 PM PDT

1966. Dimitri Tsafendas, the man who murdered South African Prime Minister, Dr HF Verwoerd, in parliament in September 1966.

Sometimes madness can be an appropriate response to reality — a sentiment South Africans, heading to the polls on 8 May 2019 in the wake of the crazy State Capture era, should be able to understand as well as any other nation. Remember Dimitri Tsafendas?

Van Gogh cut off his ear and invented modern art as we know it. Kurt Gödel, a friend of Einstein and the inventor of a key mathematical technique, starved himself to death because he believed his food was poisoned.

Even Churchill, a gin-swilling saviour of liberal democracy, was so suicidal he told his doctor he always had to keep a pillar between himself and any railway track.

It's true that mental illness can sometimes paralyse people. At other times it seems to function as a spur to greatness.

Elsewhere, it permits critical distance from social madness. Thus early Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay was so barmy he lived in caves and offered random visitors his earthly savings to burn his body. Yet he also saw the absurdity of an egalitarian religious order that tolerated slavery.

Enter perhaps South Africa's most famous mad radical, Dimitri Tsafendas, the man who stabbed Hendrik Verwoerd to death in Parliament in 1966.

Judge Andries Beyers famously wrote in Tsafendas' verdict: "I can as little try [him]… as a dog or an inert implement."

Now, 50 years later, Tsafendas, who died in 1999, is provoking lively discussion again, thanks to a new and stunningly thorough biography of Tsafendas by Harris Dousemetzis. Dousemetzis argues that Tsafendas killed Verwoerd for political reasons and then faked his tapeworm to escape torture and the gallows.

Dousemetzis begins by painting a portrait of Tsafendas as a passionate communist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist activist. Here, it must be said that the picture of Tsafendas's life that emerges is perhaps slightly at odds with the portrait Dousemetzis apparently wishes to render, of a Lenin or Slovo-like figure, driven to a peripatetic lifestyle only by the pig-headed dogmatism of immigration authorities keeping a known communist from his homeland.

What emerged for this reader, however, was a figure more reminiscent of Lay or Gödel: a brilliant, yet an intermittently unstable man, given to frequent fights with employers, impulsive resignations and rapid changes of plans — someone whose visionary genius seemed inextricably tied up with a kind of madness.

Thus, at any number of points in the story Dousemetzis tells, Tsafendas might have settled down and had a good life for which, we are told, he deeply longed.

In 1961, for example, Tsafendas developed a reputation as an English teacher in the Istanbul Greek community. He charmed his pupils; became an honorary member of a priest's family, showed around tourists and fielded marriage proposals.

Yet something gnawed at him, until in December 1961 he voluntarily uprooted himself for the dozenth time and headed for Portugal, via Bulgaria and Greece, in the hope of heading back to southern Africa.

Was it an intermittent tapeworm delusion that so goaded the man?

Tsafendas had, after all, been hospitalised for a tapeworm delusion at Grafton State Hospital, Massachusetts, in 1946, and again in Hamburg, in 1955. After the assassination, at least six psychiatrists confirmed his diagnosis of schizophrenia and/or delusion (Sakinofsky, MacGregor, Zabow, Kossew, Cooper, and Erasmus).

Even as late as 1996, long after any threat of execution had receded, he still discussed the worm in some detail with his first biographer, Henk van Woerden — a man even Dousemetzis admits Tsafendas trusted. Tsafendas told Van Woerden he'd contracted the tapeworm as a boy, but medicine had killed only half of it. Until the end, Tsafendas left instructions in his will for his body to be biopsied to find the worm.

Dousemetzis' argument against all this rather compelling evidence is threefold.

First, he draws heavily on interviews he conducted with a wide range of friends and family who simply do not believe Tsafendas had the tapeworm. Especially important are two Greek Orthodox priests who visited Tsafendas in hospital at the end of his life — Father Minas Constandinou and Bishop Ioannis Tsaftaridis. Dousemetzis' hypothesis is that Tsafendas felt a rare comfort with these two men, a closeness even beyond that he experienced with Henk van Woerden. This permitted him to tell them what we might call the alternative history of the worm.

Namely: In 1942, Tsafendas got the idea from a fellow mental patient in the Metropolitan State Hospital in Massachusetts, named Tom Tuff. Tuff, like Tsafendas, was supposedly faking illness to avoid the World War 2 draft. According to Dousemetzis, Tuff's con trick—pretending to have a tapeworm delusion—raised no questions because of its bold, exotic originality.

So when a penniless Tsafendas next needed to fake insanity to get a meal and bed, in 1946, he supposedly borrowed Tuff's story. Voila! Tsafendas's new insanity show was a hit, and, the way Dousemetzis tells it, the man never looked back.

Second, Dousemetzis takes apart Tsafendas's trial itself. Dousemetzis speculates that Major-General van den Bergh, chief of the Security Branch and head of the assassination investigation, might have suppressed evidence of Tsafendas's sanity and encouraged Tsafendas's torturers to pressure Tsafendas to blame a tapeworm for his act, so as to keep the apartheid security apparatus from looking weak and incompetent.

Dousemetzis also interviews the psychiatrists who diagnosed Tsafendas as schizophrenic and gets them to say that they were unable to check into Tsafendas's medical history as thoroughly as they might have liked. Dousemetzis points out prosecutorial failures during Tsafendas's summary trial, such as the failure to raise Tsafendas's very lucid and political initial statement to the police after the assassination, which made no mention of a tapeworm.

Finally, Dousemetzis interviews some additional psychiatrists who tell him someone with such a tapeworm delusion, even an intermittent one, would have been likely to mention it to friends and confidantes. According to Dousemetzis, the only times Tsafendas did so prior to 1966 was always in the context of a joke about Tsafendas having been able to fool the educated whitecoats.

What to make of all this? Critics such as Imraan Buccus have called Dousemetzis's case "unanswerable." A petition by George Bizos and others to the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development calls for the government to acknowledge Dousemetzis's new research and to revise educational curricula.

And indeed it would be silly to not recognise the power of Dousemetzis's accomplishment. The fact that the assassination was politically motivated has been known for decades, and yet it has taken Dousemetzis to launch the long-overdue effort to officially acknowledge this.

Then, too, Dousemetzis has interviewed many dozens of confidantes of Tsafendas, and scoured what seems to be many hundreds of original documents.

Regarding the tapeworm, Dousemetzis certainly raises a plausible case, albeit not a watertight one.

His reasoning seems to boil down to: If Tsafendas didn't "seem" schizophrenic to his community, and if he told a half dozen people he had faked a tapeworm, then by definition he must have been sane.

Yet neither of these assumptions seem sustainable. Recent literature about functional schizophrenia supports the idea that patients with active delusions can hold down jobs and maintain families far more successfully than Tsafendas ever did — especially when those delusions are intermittent. Testimonies describe the surprise of friends and acquaintances when the author reveals she experiences continual auditory hallucinations, implying an ability on the part of functional schizophrenics to hide their symptoms.

As for the boasts about fooling doctors, most people have met a charming raconteur in a bar or at a party who has been able to minimise her own mental vulnerability through self-deprecation, laughing off, for example, a suicide attempt as a play for attention.

Tsafendas took his tapeworm, fabricated or otherwise, to the grave with him. It is unlikely if we will ever know for sure whether he was telling the truth to Father Minas and Bishop Ioannis, or to Henk van Woerden, or both. Perhaps part of him experienced his tapeworm as a real delusion, while another part related to it as a strategic fabrication. Perhaps when his medications controlled his psychoses, it seemed to him as though the tapeworm had never been more than a tool, like the knife he used to stab the architect of apartheid.

Again, the push to rehabilitate him as a freedom fighter is overdue. Tsafendas needs a monument; an exhibition in the Apartheid Museum; rewritten textbooks; a primetime television special on the SABC.

Yet in the effort to serve Tsafendas justice, it is important not to accept the ableist terms of the apartheid state that first dismissed him as an "inert implement".

Someone can, like the economist John Nash in the book and film A Beautiful Mind, be both delusional and brilliant.

A tapeworm can be right about tyrannicide. Killing a madman can be a gloriously rational act of lunacy that mitigates oppression.

Indeed, as Philip K. Dick noted, sometimes madness can be an appropriate response to reality — a sentiment South Africans, heading to the elections on 8 May 2019 in the wake of the crazy State Capture era, should be able to understand as well as any other nation. DM

Glen Relief's The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. He is currently writing a speculative novel about Tsafendas's tapeworm.

Watch Pauli van Wyk's Cat Play The Piano Here!

No, not really. But now that we have your attention, we wanted to tell you a little bit about what happened at SARS.

Tom Moyane and his cronies bequeathed South Africa with a R48-billion tax shortfall, as of February 2018. It's the only thing that grew under Moyane's tenure... the year before, the hole had been R30.7-billion. And to fund those shortfalls, you know who has to cough up? You - the South African taxpayer.

It was the sterling work of a team of investigative journalists, Scorpio's Pauli van Wyk and Marianne Thamm along with our great friends at amaBhungane, that caused the SARS capturers to be finally flushed out of the system. Moyane, Makwakwa… the lot of them... gone.

But our job is not yet done. We need more readers to become Maverick Insiders, the friends who will help ensure that many more investigations will come. Contributions go directly towards growing our editorial team and ensuring that Daily Maverick and Scorpio have a sustainable future. We can't rely on advertising and don't want to restrict access to only those who can afford a paywall subscription. Membership is about more than just contributing financially – it is about how we Defend Truth, together.

So, if you feel so inclined, and would like a way to support the cause, please join our community of Maverick Insiders.... you could view it as the opposite of a sin tax. And if you are already Maverick Insider, tell your mother, call a friend, whisper to your loved one, shout at your boss, write to a stranger, announce it on your social network. The battle for the future of South Africa is on, and you can be part of it.

Glen Retief

Potentially deadly tapeworm can affect dogs and humans alike - TheSpec.com

Posted: 15 Apr 2019 12:00 AM PDT

WATERLOO REGION — Dogs and humans can be infected by a potentially deadly tapeworm that University of Guelph researchers say is now in southern Ontario, including Waterloo Region.

The tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis, wasn't thought to be present in Ontario until five sick dogs from the west side of Lake Ontario — in the Golden Horseshoe area — were identified between 2012 and 2016.

One of the infected dogs was from Guelph, said Andrew Peregrine, a professor at Guelph's Ontario Veterinary College and one of the authors of a published study on the tapeworm's presence in the province.

After the cluster of infections was found, Peregrine and the chief medical officer of health for the Guelph area spoke up.

"She said, 'You folks have got to map where this parasite is in Ontario because, at the moment, it's not on the radar of any physicians because we're not supposed to have it in Ontario,'" he said.

At that point, the tapeworm was known to exist in the southern part of the Prairie provinces and in bordering states but not in Ontario, he said.

"Unlike the tapeworms that typically occur in dogs and cats, this one is really nasty," Peregrine said, adding that it can cause disease of the liver and, if left untreated, can spread to other organs and cause death in dogs and humans.

From 2015 to 2017, Peregrine and a team of researchers tested 460 foxes and coyote carcasses in southern Ontario and Waterloo Regionfor the tapeworm. The carcasses were from licensed hunters and trappers and the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. Of those tested, 23 per cent were infected; in Waterloo Region, three of the 12 carcasses that were tested were infected.

"Now we've got clear evidence it's widespread in southern Ontario," Peregrine said. "The concern about that is now that it's a very common infection in foxes and coyotes, it's very likely it will spill over into dogs."

And if it spreads to dogs, it can potentially infect their human companions.

'If you cross your eyes, they'll get stuck like that' and other white lies parents tell their kids - Omaha World-Herald

Posted: 29 Apr 2019 10:00 PM PDT

The other day, my sister-in-law and I sat down to swap mom stories. We talked about the cute and funny things our kiddos had done lately and we shared the guilty moments when we yelled too much. Then I asked her a question I've been meaning to discuss with someone for a while.

"Do you ever tell your kids completely ridiculous things just to get them to obey?"

She had no idea what I was talking about. Luckily, my 10-year-old daughter chose just that moment to walk up to the table and lick her sister. It was then I decided to tell her that if she didn't stop licking random things and/or people, she was going to end up with a tape worm.

It's anyone's guess why those words came out of my mouth, but there are some moments in motherhood that cannot be explained.

Maybe the better question is why my 10-year-old thinks she should lick things in the first place. Her siblings. Her mother. Random tables. Stuffed animals she's decided to claim as her own. Okay, I know why she licks things; it's because she knows it drives me crazy.

My sister-in-law suddenly understood what I meant. Which led me to confess other white lies that might be affecting my kids' future adult lives.

For instance, I'm a stickler about my kids wearing socks in public places that require them to take off their shoes. My children hate this rule. They can climb play equipment better without socks. Their sweaty, sticky feet have just the right kind of traction to handle tubes and rock walls and ball pits. My solution to this, since they were very little, is to tell them if they take off their socks in public, they're going to get a foot fungus. Now, I hear them warning each other, anytime one of them risks going without socks, "You're going to get a foot fungus!"

Pair that with the number of conversations I've had to explain what a foot fungus is, and I've created a totally irrational fear in my children that they might carry with them their entire lives.

I'm not the first mom to use this tactic. I grew up with all kinds of crazy ideas running through my head. For instance, if I crossed my eyes for too long, they would get stuck like that. Or that if I swallowed gum, it would stay in my stomach for seven years. My personal favorite from my mom is that techno music is trying to hypnotize me.

I still get antsy when someone turns on a dance anthem. My husband makes fun of me often for demanding we change the channel if I feel vaguely hypnotized.

Wrong or right, white-lying to our children for their benefit is a regular mom right of passage. One day, they'll become parents of their own and either pass along these gems of mine or come up with new ones of their very own. But I guarantee, once they've worked out the possibly therapy-inducing consequences from their own childhood, they'll find plenty of ways to make up random reasons for their kiddos to obey.

And when I'm grandma, I'll be happy to back them up.

Rachel Higginson is a married mom to five kids. She is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who has received a Utopia Award for Best Contemporary Romance and Penned Con Award for Best Novella Series. She lives in Omaha.

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