‘Still alive and wriggling:’ Doctors remove 3-inch parasitic worm from woman’s brain in world first
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.
One colleague in the hospital lab was able to reach an animal parasitology expert at a governmental scientific research agency just 20 minutes away – and found their unexpected answer.
“We were able to send the live wiggling worm to him, and he was able to look at it and immediately identify it,” Senanayake said.
Molecular tests confirmed it was
Ophidascaris robertsi, a roundworm usually found in pythons, according to a press release from the Australian National University and the Canberra Hospital.
“To our knowledge, this is also the first case to involve the brain of any mammalian species, human or otherwise,” said Senanayake, who is also a professor at Australian National University.
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This case in Australia is entirely different from recent reports of people developing painful headaches with tapeworm larvae found in their brain.
That condition is known as
neurocysticercosis, which can cause neurological symptoms when larval cysts develop in the brain.
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