Several Australian media have brought to light a curious medical case that occurred between 2021 and 2022. On those dates, a woman was admitted to the hospital in Canberra (Australia) with a picture of depression, memory loss, coughing, vomiting, night terrors and stomach pain. After deciding to operate on her, the doctors extracted a live worm measuring 8 centimeters from her brain, something that had never been recorded before.
The surgery was performed after diagnosing “an atypical lesion in the right frontal lobe of the brain,” he says Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious disease specialist at the medical center. “Everyone in that operating room had the shock of their life when the surgeon reached for a pair of forceps to remove an abnormality and the abnormality turned out to be a live, light red, 8cm wriggling worm. Even if you remove the icky factor , this is a new infection never before documented in a human being,” he adds.
“She became an accidental guest,” he explains Mehrab Hossain, an Australian expert in parasitology. This is because these kinds of brain worms are common in a type of python native to Australia, and the woman became infected after consuming some herbs she gathered herself that must have contained python feces. In those stools there were larvae of this parasite, which, as has been documented for the first time, lodged and developed in her brain, where the animal has lived for about two months.
Dr. Senanayake, who is also an associate professor of medicine at the Australian National University (ANU)), states that more and more new infections are produced by contact with animals whose habitat is invaded.
“You just notice that as the human population grows, we approach and invade the habitats of animals. This is a problem that we see over and over again, whether it’s the Nipah virus that spread from wild bats to domestic pigs and then to people, or either a coronavirus. like Sars or Mers that has jumped from bats to possibly a secondary animal and then to humans,” he explains.