When a 64-year-old Australian woman was sent to hospital for brain surgery, neurosurgeon Dr. Hari Priya Bandi was not expecting to pull out a live 8-centimeter (3-inch) long parasitic roundworm that wriggled between her forceps.
“I’ve only come across worms using my not-so-good gardening skills … I find them terrifying and this is not something I deal with at all,” Bandi told CNN of the world’s first discovery of a live worm inside a human brain. The finding unleashed a mad scramble to find out what exactly the parasite was, Canberra Hospital infectious disease expert Sanjaya Senanayake told CNN.
At some point, pythons also eat those same infected animals, and the parasite then lives inside the snake, completing the cycle. In this case, the patient was likely an accidental host of the worm, Senanayake said. The parasite is highly invasive and it is suspected that its larvae, or juveniles, were present in other organs in the woman’s body, including the lungs and liver.
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