(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Live worm removed from woman's brain [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-29 A 64-year-old woman in Canberra, Australia, was discovered to have a live parasitic worm inside of her brain. This is new in the annals of medicine. The woman had reported to doctors since 2021, complaining of several symptoms that had developed initially over a three-week span: abdominal pain, chronic dry cough, fever, forgetfulness and depression, among others. Dr. Sanjaya Senanayake, speaking with ABC News (Australia), noted that the patient had what was a “mystery diagnosis” that appeared immunological in nature. The neurosurgeon, Dr. Hari Priya Bandi, performing a biopsy to narrow down the cause of this illness, encountered the worm while examining the patient’s frontal lobes. Instead of finding evidence of perhaps cancer or an abscess, as Dr. Senanayake explained, instead what she saw was something moving, something itself alive. Southeastern New South Wales is where the woman resides. She apparently had foraged for warrigal greens for cooking, a type of vegetation common to that area, and picked some that possibly had been contaminated with the feces of carpet pythons. The parasite, Ophidascaris robertsi, is known to have a life cycle where it sheds its eggs inside of a python host, which then are deposited on the forest floor along with the reptile’s waste. Other animals such as marsupials come along and ingest the flora, whereupon the eggs develop inside that host. The marsupial is later eaten by another carpet python, thus completing the worm’s life cycle. It’s suspected that the woman became contaminated after touching the foraged greens or even possibly from eating them. This particular worm, which also can be found in other snakes around the globe, had never been seen in humans until now. When doctors removed it from the patient’s brain, it was still alive and wriggling, eight centimeters long and a vivid red. Officially, doctors described the creature as “a stringlike structure within the lesion . . . a live and motile helminth.” Dr. Senanayake, speaking with The Project, noted that imaging had also captured unusual findings. CT scans “showed lots of spots on her lungs and her liver, which in retrospect were different larvae or worms moving around her body.” The patient was treated in the hospital, though as this is a world’s first, doctors are still monitoring her to see how she responds to treatment. In the meantime, she has returned to her community, where she is hopefully surrounded by a support network while she recovers. The case report can be found here. Watch and learn more about this unprecedented discovery: “Surgeons extract live worm from patient’s brain” (NBC News) “Surgeons pull an 8cm worm from a woman’s brain in Canberra” (ABC News [Australia]) “Live worm found in Australian woman’s brain” (BBC News) “Live Worm Found in Woman’s Brain in World First” (Firstpost) “Live Worm Found in Australian Woman’s Brain in World First” (The Project) [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/29/2190287/-Live-worm-removed-from-woman-s-brain Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/