She had been hospitalized several times and each time diagnosis and treatment did not seem to result in a solution for a 64-year-old woman from New South Wales, Australia, who had a live parasitic worm harvested from her brain. The discovery came during a recent examination at Canberra Hospital by neurosurgeon Hari Priya Bandi, who removed an eight-centimetre-long parasitic roundworm from the woman. The Guardian said the woman first presented to hospital in late January 2021 after suffering from abdominal pain and diarrhea for the previous three weeks, followed by a constant dry cough, fever and night sweats.
The diagnoses
In 2022, the woman’s symptoms worsened and she experienced temporary amnesia and depression. At that point, doctors at the local hospital advised her to go to the best equipped facility in Canberra, where an MRI revealed some abnormalities that required surgery. But even then, the woman’s diagnosis didn’t seem complete: “The neurosurgeon certainly didn’t think they would find a wriggling worm,” said the hospital’s infectious diseases doctor Sanjaya Senanayake — neurosurgeons regularly deal with infections in the brain to fight but that was a one-time discovery in his career. Nobody expected it. When the worm was finally discovered, the hospital’s medical team met to determine treatments based on the type of roundworm.
Therefore, it was necessary to send the still-living worm to a laboratory at the Csiro Research Center, which identified the parasite as Ophidascaris robertsi, which is normally found in pythons. But how did it get into the woman’s brain? The patient lives in a sea area where these animals are very common. Although she never had direct contact with snakes, she often gathered herbs and vegetables from the lake shore to cook them. The woman’s case would be the world’s first finding of this type of parasite in a human and was documented in the September issue of the journal Ophidascaris robertsi. Now the woman is successfully recovering from the operation and is being monitored constantly.
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