An 8cm worm was removed from the brain of a 64-year-old woman at a hospital in Australia, according to The Guardian.
A scenario that Dr. House is worthy. Hari Priya Bandi, an infectious disease surgeon, has removed a three-inch parasitic worm that had been in the brain of one of her patients, a 64-year-old woman, for several months, according to our colleagues at the Guardian and The Canberra Times.
The patient, from south-east Australia, goes to local doctors in late January 2021 after suffering from abdominal pain and diarrhea for three weeks, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.
Many symptoms
A year later, new symptoms emerged, memory loss and depression, prompting her to seek hospital treatment in Canberra, the Australian capital. An MRI of his brain is done and shows an “anomaly requiring surgery.”
“The neurosurgeon certainly didn’t expect to find a wriggling worm,” says The Guardian’s Sanjaya Senanayake, a doctor specializing in infectious diseases.
“Neurosurgeons routinely deal with infections in the brain, but that’s a unique thing in the profession. Nobody expected that,” he continues.
A first in humans
The 8-centimetre-long worm in question was analyzed by a laboratory at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia’s government agency for scientific research.
It is an “Ophidascaris robertsi”, “a parasitic species particularly known for its ability to nest in pythons, but which has never been detected in humans before,” summarize our colleagues at Liberation.
How was such a transfer possible? The patient lives near a lake where pythons are numerous. Although she had never been bitten and strayed from The Last of Us scenarios, the 64-year-old frequently collected herbs and plants around the lake, including horned tetragonium, which she used in cooking.
Australian doctors suspect she was contaminated with one of these plants, which may have been contaminated by the parasitic worm via the excrement of a host python. After brain surgery, the patient needed treatment to remove potential larvae that could be in other parts of her body.