Doctors in Australia had examined and performed tests on a woman to find out why she was sick after being hospitalized with abdominal pains and diarrhea. They were not prepared for what they found: a 3-inch red worm lived in the woman’s brain.
The worm was removed last year after doctors spent more than a year trying to find the cause of the woman’s discomfort. (Her condition is improving.)
The discovery was described this month in a journal from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The woman, whom the article identifies as a 64-year-old resident of southeastern New South Wales, Australia, was admitted to a hospital in January 2021 after complaining of diarrhea and abdominal pain for three weeks. She had a dry cough and night sweats.
Scientists and doctors from Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne said in the article that the woman was initially told she had a rare lung infection, but the cause was unknown.
Her symptoms improved with treatment, but weeks later she was hospitalized again with fever and cough. Doctors then treated her for a group of blood disorders known as hypereosinophilic syndrome, and the medication they used suppressed her immune system.
For three months in 2022, he experienced blackouts and worsening depression. An MRI showed he had a brain injury, and in June of that year, doctors performed a biopsy.
Inside the lesion, doctors found a “rope-like structure,” the live parasitic worm, and removed it.
They determined that it was an Ophidascaris robertsi, a roundworm endemic to Australia that reproduces in a large snake, the carpet python. Pythons shed the worm eggs in their feces. Small mammals then ingest the eggs and worms can grow inside them.
There were carpet pythons in a lake area near where the woman lived, the article said. She had no direct contact with the snakes, but often collected New Zealand spinach from around the lake for cooking. The article said that she may have inadvertently consumed worm eggs by eating the vegetables because her hands or her kitchen were contaminated with them. Scott Gardner, curator of the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said people should practice good hygiene to avoid infection.
“Many of the parasites that can affect people do so because we go to the wrong place at the wrong time,” Gardner said.
By: AMANDA HOLPUCH
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6897080, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-18 20:30:07
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