Posted on 08/29/2023 1:00:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The red worm was alive and wriggling as doctors pulled it out of the woman's brain.
Figure from paper showing an MRI scan of a lesion in the woman's brain on the left and two images of the extracted worm on the right
A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan revealed the woman had a lesion in her brain (left), which doctors later found to contain a 3.15 inch-long worm (right). (Image credit: Hossain, M. E., et al. (2023). https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2909.230351. (CC BY 4.0)) A woman in Australia has become the first known person in the world to be infected with a parasitic worm that normally lives in pythons — after doctors found it wriggling in her brain.
The 64-year-old, who lives in New South Wales, Australia, was initially hospitalized several times in 2021 for a variety of symptoms, including abdominal pain, diarrhea, fever and persistent cough. At the time, exams revealed injuries in her lungs, liver and spleen and a remarkably high number of immune cells in the blood.
She was put on immune-suppressing drugs for this rare blood disorder, but in 2022 she was hospitalized again after developing forgetfulness and worsening depression for three months. Doctors then took a brain scan and found injured tissue in the front right side of her brain.
Soon after, doctors performed a brain biopsy and extracted a live, 3.15 inch-long (8 centimeters) wriggling red worm from her brain belonging to a species called Ophidascaris robertsi, which has never been known to infect humans before.
"Neurosurgeons regularly deal with infections in the brain, but this was a once-in-a-career finding," Dr. Sanjaya Senanayake, a case report author and associate professor at the Australian National University, told The Guardian. "No one was expecting to find that."
Related: Rare 'brain-eating' amoeba infection behind death of 2-year-old in Nevada
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Worse than being “bugged” by Agent Smith in The Matrix.
Red Wigglers are the “Cadillac of Worms.”
EEEWWWWW...
The Last of Us.
could substantially improve the quality of government?
Where in Asia did she immigrate from?
While operating, the OR staff were heard singing,
“Never gonna give you up
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you”
Did they get all the worm eggs it laid in her brain?.....
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