NO wonder the Americans struggled in Vietnam! I’ve only watched a TV programme about killer insects and diseases and I’m outta there.

A flea that can cause the plague, a tapeworm cyst on some beef, blood soup and a haemoglobin sucking leech are among the delights featured on this programme, hosted by the cheerful, almost gleeful, Dr Mike Leahy.

The good doctor is, of course, an adventure junkie, so bouncing around Hanoi and actively sorting out a joint of beef with a free tapeworm cyst, which he promptly swallows, counts as fun.

It gets worse! The aforementioned leech crawls up his backside and is making its way round to his, er, front, before he manages to tear it off and hurl it into the swamp. Unluckily for his paramedic assistant, Michelle, she has to inspect as to any potential damage the leech may have done — it has drawn blood. And we get to see it! “That leech was settling in for a feast,” he laughs.

Any more? A duck that causes bird flu. “Experts think it’s only a matter of time before bird flu can transfer from human to human,” Leahy explains, before happily pointing out that two brothers caught the disease from eating blood soup, which contained said duck.

The soup is now banned, but, guess what, he manages to find some. “It’s an acquired taste,” he says. One that I won’t be acquiring, pal.

Next up is a killer flea that lives on some rats and can spread the plague — for those of you who thought you were safe these days, there are still 3,000 cases of the plague worldwide every year.

It goes on: black scorpions, the Vietnamese centipede and a student biting beetle — they’re all included in the holiday.

Back to the tapeworm: Dr Leahy goes to the loo, but there’s not much to his worm, so he goes off to a lab where he finds a five metre one that existed inside someone and would have grown in just three months — “This is what I was hoping to grow,” he says, in the kind of disappointed tone a runner up in a biggest marrow contest might use when presenting the trophy to the winner.

These things split into parts, of which each one is capable of carrying 100,000 eggs.

"When you have eaten a beef tapeworm you have got a friend for life because these guys can live for up to 20 years,”

Leahy says. Brilliant, I’ve been looking for a friend.

Anyway, I’ve heard there are some cheap holidays to Vietnam going . . .