An English woman living in Australia has the dubious honor of being a world first after medics extracted from her brain a living, squirming, 8 cm parasitic worm, usually found in snakes.
The 64-year-old woman, who has not yet been named, was infected with Ophidascaris robertsi, a type of roundworm that can grow to about the length of a Twix chocolate bar.
This parasitic worm is normally only found in the guts of carpet pythons living in the Australian state of New South Wales.
Medics suspect the woman accidentally ate the worm’s eggs by eating edible grass contaminated with snake feces.
After hatching in her body, the larvae made their way to her brain, a fact that doctors suspect was due to drugs she was taking that compromised her immune system.
Doctors were shocked when they pulled a live and writhing 8 cm parasitic worm from the 64-year-old woman’s brain
Doctors scanned the woman’s brain after she reported becoming forgetful and increasingly depressed. They identified a lesion on the left side of the organ (white shaded spot) worth investigating.
Woman’s ordeal, described in the medical journal Emerging infectious diseasesbegan in January 2021 when she was admitted to a hospital in the Australian capital Canberra.
She told doctors she had abdominal pain and diarrhea for three weeks before developing a dry cough and night sweats.
Tests for any infection were ‘inconclusive’ and she was eventually diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown origin and placed on steroids.
Although she initially got better, a few weeks later she was back in the hospital with a fever and persistent cough.
Medics suspected she had T-cell-driven hypereosinophilic syndrome, a potentially life-threatening condition in which the body’s immune system goes into overdrive, and she was put on immunosuppressive medication.
But in January 2022, she suddenly started developing forgetfulness and worsening depression, symptoms that prompted doctors to look at her brain.
Scans revealed a lesion in her brain and she went under the knife in June last year.
During surgery, the doctors discovered a strange ‘string-like structure’ in the lesion and were shocked when it started to squirm.
Analysis of the worm revealed that it belonged to a family of parasites normally found only in snakes, making it the first known human infection of its kind ever recorded.
During further operations, no other worms were found in the woman’s body.
Six months after surgery, the woman’s forgetfulness and depression had improved, but were still present.
Medics say it will be important to keep an eye on her in the future, as tests on rats have shown that the worm’s eggs can survive in the body for more than four years.
While it cannot be confirmed how she was infected, the case report authors speculated that her history of gathering native vegetation to eat could be a possible cause.
“We hypothesized that she accidentally consumed eggs, either directly from vegetation or indirectly through contamination of her hands or kitchen equipment,” they said.
They added that while the species of worm was known to infect the digestive systems of animals, it had not previously been found in the brains of any species.
The authors theorized that the medication suppressing her immune system might have played a role in allowing the digested egg to reach her brain.
“The patient’s immunosuppression may have allowed the larvae to migrate to the central nervous system,” they wrote.
Since the worm is normally only found in the guts of carpet pythons (pictured), experts suspect the women became infected by eating vegetation unknowingly infested with snakefaces
They added that while the specific worm in question was only found in Australia, other similar species are found elsewhere in the world, meaning there is a potential for more cases in the future.
But more broadly, they said the case highlights the ongoing risk of zoonotic diseases spreading between humans and animals.
Zoonotic diseases, diseases that spread from animals to humans, are often cited as a possible cause of pandemics.
While it would be unlikely in this particular case, scientists have sounded the alarm that avian flu will make the leap to humans in the future.