Scientists say they have discovered a live worm in the brain of an Australian woman. This is the first time such a finding has been made. The worm measures about 8cm or 3 inches.
The “string-like structure” was taken out of the patient’s injured frontal lobe during a surgery in Canberra last year.
It was not what we thought would happen. Dr Hari Priya Bandi, the surgeon in charge, stated that everyone was extremely surprised.
The woman, who is 64 years old, had been experiencing stomach pain, a cough, and night sweats for several months. These symptoms then progressed to forgetfulness and feeling sad all the time.
She went to the hospital in late January 2021, and a scan later showed “an unusual spot in the front right part of her brain”.
However, the reason for her condition was only discovered when Dr. Bandi performed a biopsy in June 2022 using his knife.
Doctors are saying that a red parasite may have been living in her brain for around two months.
The woman, who lived close to a lake in the south-eastern part of New South Wales state, is getting better.
A study in the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal mentioned a case where larvae invaded and grew in a person’s brain. This is the first known case of this happening.
When I removed it, it was joyfully moving.
The neurosurgeon who discovered the worm claimed that when she first touched it, she had just started to touch the portion of the brain that had mysteriously appeared in the images.
Dr. Bandi remarked, “I thought, gosh, that feels funny, you couldn’t see anything more abnormal.”
“And after I could actually feel something, I yanked it out with my tweezers and said, ‘Gosh! And what is that? It’s jogging!”
“Everyone was in disbelief. The worm that we discovered was also enthusiastically and furiously crawling outside the brain, she added.
Then, she asked her coworker Sanjaya Senanayake, who is an expert in infectious diseases, for advice on what they should do.
“Everyone in the operating room was very surprised when the surgeon used a tool called forceps to grab something unusual. It turned out to be a moving, live worm that was 8 centimeters long and light red,” explained Dr.
“Even if you remove the grossness, this is a new illness that has never been recorded in a person before. ”
Scientists are cautioning that this case shows how diseases and infections can easily spread from animals to humans, posing a greater risk.
The Ophidascaris robertsi worm is often found in carpet pythons, which are harmless snakes that live in many parts of Australia.
Scientists believe that the woman probably got the roundworm when she picked up a kind of grass called Warrigal greens near a lake close to her home. Carpet pythons also live in the area.
An Australian parasite expert named Mehrab Hossain wrote in a journal that she thinks a woman became an “accidental host” because she used plants she found for cooking that were contaminated with snake poop and parasite eggs.
DrHossain says that no one had ever reported before that Ophidascaris larvae invade the brain.
The growth of the third-stage larva in humans is important because other studies haven’t shown larva development in animals like sheep, dogs, and cats.
Dr Senanayake, who is a professor of medicine at the Australian National University (ANU), told the BBC that this case serves as a warning.
The ANU team has found that 30 new kinds of infections have emerged in the past 30 years. Three out of every four diseases are zoonotic, which means they are infectious and have passed from animals to humans.
As the number of people grows, we get closer to where animals live and take over their homes. This is a problem that keeps happening. For example, the Nipah virus moves from wild bats to domestic pigs and then to humans. Another example is the Sars or Mers coronavirus, which goes from bats to possibly another animal before infecting humans.
Even though Covid is getting better, it is still important for experts and governments to have good ways to monitor infectious diseases.