Diagnosis of parasitic lesions of the lung in the practice of a physiatrist

Echinococcosis and alveococcosis of the lungs are zoonotic infections caused by the larval stage of Echinococcus helminths. The difficulty of diagnosing these helminth infections is due to their slow development and their similarity to several diseases, including malignant neoplasms and tuberculosis. Delay in making the correct diagnosis leads to the development of advanced cases and longer treatment. The aim of the review was to inform physiatrists, pulmonologists, infectious disease specialists, therapists, and thoracic surgeons about the complexity of the differential diagnosis of echinococcosis with atypical limited localization (with isolated lung damage). Conclusion. Diagnosis of echinococcosis presents significant difficulties due to the absence of symptoms pathognomonic for the parasitic process and a typical clinical manifestation of the disease, due to similarity with a number of nosologies of infectious and non-infectious origin, and absence of liver lesions and multilocular cysts, usually detected by CT or MRI. An immunological blood test for specific IgG should be performed at the early stages of diagnosis in patients without bacterial excretion, with suspected tuberculosis, and with an ambiguous clinical picture of pulmonary lesions. However, sometimes this blood test can be false negative because of a weak immune response.