A Moving Bump on This Woman's Face Turned Out to Be a Live Worm
This is the stuff nightmares are made of.
We thought finding aspider in your earwas bad. But a 32-year-old woman in Russia had a live worm removed from her face and we just can’t.
It sounds like a horror story, but this very real case of the heebie-jeebies appeared in theNew England Journal of Medicinethis week.
The patient documented the moving creepy-crawly in a series of selfies (naturally) seen below. She first noticed a lump below her left eye, which moved above her eye a few days later. Ten days after that, the lump settled into her upper lip. Other than having a bumpmovingaround her face, she experienced only occasional bouts of an itching and burning sensation.
After two weeks of these symptoms, the woman brought herself to a doctor, where a living parasite was removed surgically and identified asDirofilaria repens, a long, thin white worm shown in image D above
D. repenstypically infects dogs and other carnivores and causes swelling and itching. When it finds its way into humans, it’s usually by accident, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Those cases typically play out pretty much just how it did for the woman in theNEJM: A single parasite under the skin that (thankfully) can’t reproduce butcanmove around.
When a person finds themselves playing host toD. repens, they have mosquitos to blame–and the woman in the NEJM report “recalled being frequently bitten” on a recent trip, the authors wrote. (As if you needed another reason to avoidmosquito bites)。目前虫only found in Europe, Asia, and Africa–and there have been more than 3,500 human cases in Europe alone since 1977.
At least this terrifying tale has a happy ending. “After removal of the worm,” the authors wrote, “the patient had a full recovery.”