Doctors pull 8-centimetre-long live worm from patient’s brain during surgery

globalnews.ca:

A woman who underwent brain surgery for a host of medical complaints got far more than she bargained for when doctors pulled an eight-centimetre-long live worm from her brain.

The patient, a 64-year-old woman from New South Wales in Australia, was admitted to a Canberra hospital in January 2021 with complaints of weeks-long diarrhea and stomach pain, fever, night sweats and a dry cough that wouldn’t go away. A year later, she began to feel forgetful and increasingly depressed.

Concerned, doctors sent her for an MRI brain scan and the results found abnormalities that would require surgery.

“But the neurosurgeon certainly didn’t go in there thinking they would find a wriggling worm,” Dr. Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease specialist and a colleague of the performing neurosurgeon, Dr. Hari Priya Bandi, told The Guardian.

“Neurosurgeons regularly deal with infections in the brain, but this was a once-in-a-career finding. No one was expecting to find that.”

The findings of the case are published in the September edition of the Emerging Infectious Diseases journal and the authors say the wriggling worm likely came after the woman unknowingly ingested the eggs of a parasitic roundworm often found in pythons in the area.

“The patient in this case resided near a lake area inhabited by carpet pythons. Despite no direct snake contact, she often collected native vegetation, warrigal greens, from around the lake to use in cooking,” the study reports. “We hypothesized that she inadvertently consumed (the) eggs either directly from the vegetation or indirectly by contamination of her hands or kitchen equipment.”

This case marks the first time the roundworm, Ophidascaris robertsi, has been documented in a human.

Senanayake told