Meguro Parasitological Museum

Meguro Parasitological Museum
目黒寄生虫館
Parasite specimens on display at the museum
Parasite specimens on display at the museum
Established 1953
Location Meguro, Tokyo
Coordinates 35°37′54″N 139°42′24″E / 35.631672°N 139.706648°E / 35.631672; 139.706648
Collection size 60,000 specimens, 300 on exhibit
Visitors 50,000 a year
Founder Dr. Satoru Kamegai
Website www.kiseichu.org

The Meguro Parasitological Museum (目黒寄生虫館, Meguro kiseichūkan) is a small medical museum in the Meguro Ward in central Tokyo, Japan. The museum is devoted to parasites and the science of parasitology, and was founded in 1953 by Dr. Satoru Kamegai, rebuilt to its present building in 1993. The two-story exhibition space provides an educational overview of the diversity of parasites in the natural world and their life cycles. The second floor exhibition space has an emphasis on parasites in humans and their effects (including the nematode, the trematode, and the tapeworm). On display are 300 preserved specimens, including an 8.8 metres (29 ft)-long Diphyllobothrium nihonkaiense tapeworm. The research library contains 60,000 parasite specimens, as well as 50,000 papers and 5,000 books on parasitology.

The museum has a gift counter on the second floor, where visitors can purchase a museum guidebook, postcards, T-shirts, or mobile-phone straps with actual parasites embedded in acrylic (either Nybelinia surmenicola or Oncomelania nosophora).

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