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Australian scientists have removed a live 8cm worm from a patient’s brain. The parasite was extracted from the woman’s damaged frontal lobe during surgery in Canberra last year. This discovery is a world first.
This is a world first that may tickle your neurons. In Canberra (Australia), a medical report mentions an 8 cm long and living worm, extracted from the brain of a patient. “It was definitely not what we expected. Everyone was in shock.” said operative surgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi.
An “atypical” lesion in the right frontal lobe
The patient, a 64-year-old woman, had been suffering for months from symptoms including stomach pain, cough and night sweats, which progressed to forgetfulness and depression. Admitted to hospital at the end of January 2021, she then underwent examinations when a scanner revealed “an atypical lesion within the right frontal lobe of the brain”. But the cause of his condition was only revealed by Dr Bandi during a biopsy in June 2022.
“Everyone in this operating room got the shock of their life when [le chirurgien] took forceps to detect an anomaly and the anomaly turned out to be a live, wriggling 8cm light red worm” announces the report. The woman has recovered well.
A worm moving “happily” in his brain
The neurosurgeon who found the worm said she was just beginning to touch the part of the brain that was damaged on the scans when she smelled it.
“I took my tweezers, pulled it out and was like, ‘My God! What is it? It’s moving! Everyone was in shock. And the worm that we found was moving happily, quite vigorously, out of the brain,” she said.
In fact, according to the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases who reported the case, it would be the first case of invasion and development of larvae in the human brain.
Increasingly frequent zoonoses
The roundworm Ophidascaris robertsi found in the human brain is common in carpet pythons, non-venomous snakes found across much of Australia. Scientists say the woman most likely caught the roundworm after picking up a native type of grass, Warrigal greens, from a lake near her home into which the python had excreted the parasite via its feces.
For Australian parasitology expert Mehrab Hossain, consulted for the report, “Third-stage larval growth in the human host is remarkable, given that previous experimental studies have not demonstrated larval development in domestic animals, such as sheep, dogs, and cats.”
But this case would be a warning: this case highlights the increased risk of diseases and infections transmitted from animals to humans.
“It just goes to show that as the human population grows, we get closer and encroach on animal habitats. It’s a problem we see again and again, whether it’s the Nipah virus that jumped from bald -wild mice to domestic pigs and then to humans whether it was a coronavirus that jumped from bats to eventually a secondary animal and then to humans Even though Covid is slowly disappearing, it is very important for epidemiologists…and governments to ensure they have good infectious disease surveillance” say the researchers.
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