Five parasites to watch out for after huge worm removed from woman's brain
This week it was reported a British woman discovered a live worm had been wriggling around in her brain for months after complaining of .
The 8cm parasite, normally found in Australian carpet pythons, was removed during surgery in a world first. The English woman had been experiencing a range of symptoms since January 2021 including diarrhoea, night sweats, cough, abdominal pain and headaches.
The parasitic roundworm had been living within a lesion in her right frontal lobe. Doctors were left with no choice but to operate to remove the spine-chilling beast as experts speculated she inadvertently consumed the worm's eggs by consuming contaminated edible grasses.
Gruesomely, there are several detailed reports of other micro-critters who have called the human body their home. Read on - if you dare.
Several parasites have been known to call our bodies home (Getty Images)Rat lungworm
Rat lungworm was first discovered in the 1930s in China and is widespread in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands. However, climate change has meant it has spread further afield and into Europe.
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While the disease is usually found in rodents, snails and slugs can become infected as they often eat the rats' faeces. In 2010 Sam Bollard, from Sydney, Australia, ate a slug as a dare from his friends.
The worm living in the woman's brain (THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSI)
The worm was pulled from the patient's frontal lobe (Australian National University)He quickly became very ill and spent 420 days in a coma. When he finally woke up he was told he had become a quadriplegic.
Sam's mother, Kate, said in 2018: "It's devastated, changed his life forever, changed my life forever. It's huge. The impact is huge."
Beetles
Infestations of beetle larvae can cause a serious disease called canthariasis. In China, researchers reported on an eight-month old girl who in 2016 was found to be infested with larvae from a cigar beetle.
They believed the youngster became infected after eating either mud or oranges.
Eye worms
In 2018 a woman pulled 14 worms out of her eye in what was believed to be the world's first case of a human contracting an infestation only ever seen before in . Abby Beckley endured weeks of tests and waiting while the little critters crawled across her eyeball and refused to leave her body.
She was 26 when she went to spend the summer working on a commercial salmon fishing boat in Craig, Alaska. Two weeks into the trip she felt something under her eyelid.
She went to check it out and was horrified when she pulled out a tiny wriggling worm from the bottom of her eyelid.
Scientists discovered they were Thelazia gulosa - parasitic worms less than half an inch long each, which, until then, have spread solely among cattle by flies that feed on eyeball lubrication. If the worms remain in an eye for a prolonged time, they can cause corneal scarring or even blindness.
Tapeworms
In 2020 a patient known as Gerard was found to have a tapeworm living in his brain - which he was told had probably been there for a decade. Doctors at the Ascension Seton Medical Centre performed MRI scans of the man’s brain, which revealed the reason for his severe headaches was a huge 5cm tapeworm. The doctors believed Gerard likely got the tapeworm from food contaminated with tapeworm eggs.
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They were able to perform surgery on Gerard to remove the tapeworm, although they warned of the dangers of living with a tapeworm for several years. If left untreated, tapeworms in the brain can lead to a parasitic infection called neurocysticercosis, which can cause seizures.
Maggots
People who travelled to tropical areas have been found to be infested with maggots. Thankfully rare, especially in the UK and USA, the condition is unknown as myiasis.
It is caused when flies deposit eggs in or near an open wound, causing the hatched larvae to burrow under the skin. If left untreated it can cause sepsis.
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