A 19-year-old rugby player from Sydney, Sam Ballard contracted rat lungworm disease and spent eight long years paralyzed before dying in November 2018.
Sam Ballard was a promising 19-year-old rugby player from Sydney, Australia, enjoying a weekend get-together with friends in 2010 when he made a random decision that would alter his life. As the friends had a “bit of a red wine appreciation night,” as friend Jimmy Galvin said, a typical garden slug crawled out in front of them.
In a moment of teenage bravado, perhaps influenced by the wine, Ballard was dared to eat the slug. “And then off Sam went,” Galvin said.
At first, everything seemed fine, and the friends carried on as usual. But within a few days’ time, Sam began to complain of severe pain in his legs. Then, he started vomiting and experiencing dizzy spells. When his condition worsened and he fell weak, his mother rushed him to the hospital.
No one could have predicted that hospital visit would result in a 420-day-long coma that would paralyze Ballard for eight years — and eventually kill him. So how could such an innocuous event cause such a horrific tragedy?
Rat Lungworm: The Rare Disease That Paralyzed Sam Ballard
When they first arrived at the hospital, Sam Ballard’s mother, Katie, feared that Sam might have multiple sclerosis — a condition that had affected his father — but doctors assured her that wasn’t the case.
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Sam turned to his mother and explained that he had eaten a slug. “And I went, ‘No, no one gets sick from that,’” she said during a segment on the Australian current affairs show The Project. As it turned out, he had indeed gotten very sick from it.
