Doctors in Australia screened, scanned and tested a woman to find out why she was sick after being hospitalized with abdominal pain and diarrhoea. They were not prepared for what they found.
A seven centimeter red worm lived in the woman’s brain.
The worm was removed last year after doctors spent more than a year trying to determine the cause of the woman’s discomfort.
The hunt for the answer and the alarming discovery were detailed this month in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a monthly journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The woman, identified in the article as a 64-year-old resident of southeastern New South Wales, Australia, was admitted to hospital in January 2021 after complaining of diarrhea and abdominal pain for three weeks. She had a dry cough and night sweats.
Scientists and doctors from Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne said in the journal article that the woman was initially told she had a rare lung infection, but the cause was unknown.
Her symptoms improved with treatment, but she was hospitalized again weeks later, this time with fever and cough. Doctors then treated her for a group of blood disorders known as hypereosinophilic syndrome, and the drug they took suppressed her immune system.
Over a three-month period in 2022, she experienced forgetfulness and worsening depression. An MRI revealed she had a brain injury, and in June 2022, doctors performed a biopsy.
Inside the lesion, doctors found a “string-like structure” and removed it. The structure was a red live parasitic worm, about 3.15 centimeters long and 0.04 centimeters in diameter.
They determined it was an Ophidascaris robertsi, a type of roundworm native to Australia that reproduces in a large snake, the carpet python, which gets its name from its intricate markings. The pythons shed the worm’s eggs in their feces. The eggs are then ingested by small mammals and the worms can grow in them.
Roundworms infect hundreds of millions of people worldwide, according to the Cleveland Clinic, but the researchers in Australia said this was the first report of the Ophidascaris worm species infecting a human.
The woman may have been infected with the worm in the same way small animals are: by accidentally consuming worm eggs.
Carpet pythons were located in a lake area near where the woman lived, the article said. She had no direct contact with the snakes, but often gathered war greens, which resemble spinach, around the lake for cooking. The article stated that she could have inadvertently eaten worm eggs by eating the vegetables or because they had contaminated her hands or her kitchen.
Scott Gardner, a professor of biological sciences and curator of the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said people should not panic about becoming infected with a snake Ophidascaris and should use good hygiene to avoid contamination. by parasites.
“Many of the parasites that can affect humans do so because we are in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Dr. Gardner, who was not involved in the Australian investigation, in an interview. “So we’re taking in some eggs that shouldn’t be getting into us, and if we have a weakened immune system, we can get a pretty serious infection.”
Karina Kennedy, director of microbiology at Canberra Hospital and author of the paper, said in a press release that the woman’s initial symptoms were “probably due to the migration of roundworm larvae from the gut to other organs, such as the liver and intestines. lungs.”
However, in the early stages of the woman’s illness, doctors couldn’t find evidence of the parasite, said Dr. Kennedy.
“At the time, trying to identify the microscopic larvae, which had never before been found to cause human infections, was a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack,” she said.
Six months after the brain surgery, the woman’s psychiatric symptoms persisted but had improved, the article said. She was also treated with drugs to kill worm larvae that may have been in her other organs. She is still being watched by infectious disease and brain specialists.
Dr. Kennedy, also an associate professor at the Australian National University medical school, advised people to wash their hands after gardening and touching food items, and to thoroughly wash food and surfaces used in cooking.
In the article, the scientists and doctors involved in the woman’s case said her experience highlighted the risk of disease spreading from animals to humans. Outbreaks of these diseases have become more frequent in recent decades and account for about 60 percent of all known infectious diseases and 75 percent of new and emerging diseases, according to the CDC.
While the type of worm that infected the woman is endemic to Australia, the Ophidascaris species infects snakes in other parts of the world. Scientists said in the article that this case shows “more human cases may emerge worldwide.”
