Independent US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., grandson of the assassinated former president, has been dealing with a series of health problems in recent years, including an anomaly he says was caused by a worm that entered him in his brain and ate part of it, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
The statements, extracted from a judicial document and which made a big fuss, led his campaign staff to come up with clarifications: the politician is fully recovered, reports Reuters and CNN.
Independent US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a brain parasite more than a decade ago but has made a full recovery, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported on the condition.
Citing a 12-year-old deposition, The New York Times wrote that Kennedy said a doctor told him an abnormality seen in a scan of his brain was caused by a worm that entered his brain, ate a portion of he and then he died.
The 2012 deposition took place during divorce proceedings from his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, The New York Times reported, when he argued that his earning power was diminished by his cognitive difficulties. Mary Richardson Kennedy committed suicide in 2012 while she and Kennedy were fighting for custody of their four children.
Kennedy “traveled extensively in Africa, South America and Asia as part of his work as an environmentalist, and in one of these locations he contracted a parasite,” Kennedy’s spokeswoman, Stefanie Spear, told Reuters.
“The problem was resolved more than 10 years ago, and he is in robust physical and mental health,” she added. “To question Mr. Kennedy’s health is a hilarious suggestion given his competition,” Spear commented, referring to the advanced ages of President Joe Biden, 81, and former President Donald Trump, 77. year old.
Kennedy, who is running as an independent against former Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic President Joe Biden for the White House in November, could get 8 percent of the vote, according to a March Reuters/Ipsos poll.
After the uproar caused by the revelations in the New York Times, Kennedy addressed the voters on the social platform X alluding to the said health problem. “I offer to eat 5 more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate,” Kennedy boasted. “I feel confident in the result even with a handicap of 6 worms,” he joked.
In 2010, Kennedy, now 70, suffered severe memory loss and experienced brain “fog,” he said in a deposition two years later. According to the NYT, he consulted top neurologists familiar with the medical history of his uncle, the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who died of brain cancer in 2009. A doctor in New York, after analyzing a scan of his brain, took said his health problems could be caused by a worm that entered his brain, ate a portion of it and then died, Kennedy said in a 2012 deposition.
Around the same time, the New York Times stated, Kennedy suffered mercury poisoning because, he says, he ate a lot of fish. Mercury poisoning can also lead to neurological problems such as loss of peripheral vision, muscle weakness and problems with movement, hearing and speech, as well as memory loss.
Kennedy told the NYT that he recovered from the memory loss and brain fog, and the parasite did not require treatment.
On the other hand, he struggled for decades with atrial fibrillation – irregular heartbeat. He told the NY Times that it has been more than a decade since he experienced the condition and said he believes he is now free of it.
Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease expert and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told CNN it was difficult to fully analyze Kennedy’s claim without looking at the scans.
“It’s an incomplete story,” as he put it. But generally speaking, Hotez said people with pig tapeworm infections in the brain — a condition known as neurocysticercosis — have more frequent seizures and sometimes need to take medication for a long time because when the worms die, it forms a calcified cyst in the brain that can cause the brain to release inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.
“Yes, worms don’t feed on the brain. They live in the brain,” said Dr. Hotez. The worms get nutrients from the body, but they don’t eat the brain tissue, he said. Pig tapeworm infections can be difficult to diagnose because when the worm is alive, it masks itself from detection and does not show up on scans. It is more common to find the worm after it has died and left behind a calcified cyst in the brain, Hotez explained.
Kennedy said she changed her lifestyle following these health episodes, including sleeping more, traveling less, cutting back on fish and undergoing chelation therapy that aims to detox the body of metals.
On the campaign trail, Kennedy portrayed himself as vivacious and youthful compared to Biden and Trump, engaging in strenuous activities such as skiing and weightlifting.
Biden’s doctor, Kevin O’Connor, said in February that there were no “new concerns” about the president’s health following a physical exam, and the White House said no cognitive test was done because O’ Connor didn’t think it was necessary.
Trump’s campaign, for its part, released a letter late last year that made general statements about his health — including claims that the former president is in “excellent” health and that his cognitive exams “were exceptional.” – but did not include information about the types of tests Trump allegedly took or what the results were.
Kennedy’s views on personal health, including his well-known skepticism of certain vaccines, were a distinctive feature of his public image. He disputed labels that he was “anti-vaccine,” even though he is the founder of Children’s Health Defense, a group that has been accused of spreading vaccine misinformation.
Tags: presidential candidate doctors dead worm brain team clarifications
