Australian Surgeon Finds 8-Centimeter-Long Live Worm in Woman’s Brain

In a world first, Dr. Hari Priya Bandi, an Australian surgeon, talks about how shocked she was when she found a live worm in a patient’s brain. A woman from Australia had a live 8cm (3in) worm in her head.

During surgery in Canberra, Dr. Hari Priya pulled the “string-like structure” out of the patient’s damaged frontal lobe. “It was nothing like what we thought it would be. “Everyone was shocked,” said the surgeon doing the operation.

The 64-year-old Australian woman had stomach pain, a cough, and night sweats for months, and then she started to forget things and feel sad.

She went to the hospital at the end of January 2021, and a scan showed that she had “an atypical lesion in the right frontal lobe of the brain.”

But during a test in June 2022, Dr. Bandi was able to find out what was wrong with her. Doctors said that the red bug could have lived in her brain for up to two months.

The woman is doing well. She lived near a lake in the southeast of the state of New South Wales.

Researchers who wrote about the case in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases think it is the first time that maggots have invaded and grown in a human brain.

“I pulled the worm out, and it was moving around happily.”

The doctor who found the worm said she hadn’t touched the part of the brain that looked strange on the scans until she felt it.

Dr. Bandi said, “I thought, “Gosh, that feels funny, you couldn’t see anything more strange.” “Then I could really feel something, so I took my tweezers and pulled it out, and I thought, ‘Gosh! So, what is it? “It moves!”

“Everyone was very surprised. “The worm we found was moving around happily and quite quickly outside the brain,” she said. Then, she asked her coworker Sanjaya Senanayake, who was an expert on deadly diseases, what they should do.

Dr. Senanayake said, “Everyone in that operating room got the biggest shock of their lives when the surgeon used forceps to pick up an abnormality and it turned out to be a moving, 8-centimeter-long light red worm.”

“Even if you don’t think it’s gross, this is a new infection that has never been seen in a person before.” Researchers say the case shows how diseases and infections can spread more easily from animals to people.

The roundworm Ophidascaris robertsi is common in carpet pythons, which are non-venomous snakes that live in most of Australia.

Scientists say that the woman probably got the roundworm when she picked Warrigal greens grass near a lake near where she lived. There are also carpet pythons living there.

Mehrab Hossain, an Australian expert in parasitology, wrote in the journal that she thought the woman became a “accidental host” after cooking with plants that had python faeces and parasite eggs on them.

“No one had heard of Ophidascaris larvae (worm) getting into the brain before,” writes Dr. Hossain.

“It’s interesting that the third-stage larva grew in the human host because previous experiments haven’t shown that the larva grew in sheep, dogs, or cats.”

The case is a warning, said Dr. Senanayake, who is also an associate professor of medicine at the Australian National University (ANU).

The ANU team says that 30 new types of diseases have appeared in the last 30 years. Three-quarters of them are zoonotic, which means they are illnesses that spread from animals to people.

“It just goes to show that as the number of people grows, we move closer and into animal areas. This is a problem that keeps coming up, like when the Nipah virus went from wild bats to farmed pigs and then to people, or when a coronavirus like Sars or Mers went from bats to another animal and then to people.

“Even though Covid is slowly dying, it is very important for epidemiologists and governments to make sure they have good infectious disease surveillance.”

Source: BBC