A 32-year-old woman in Russia visited medics after noticing strange lumps on her face for two weeks, where she discovered she had a worm living under her skin.
The unnamed woman went to an eye doctor after the bumps, which she said itched and burned, moved from her eye socket to her lip, making it swell up like a balloon.
She had first noticed a small bump beneath her left eye, then five days later it had moved of its own accord to the top of her eye, just above her eyelid.
It remained there for ten days, before disappearing and then causing her top lip to swell up far beyond its normal size.
Doctors saw the lump was moving, identified it as a parasitic worm and removed it with surgery.
The type of worm which lodged itself in the woman's eye are the kind which can enter people's immune system and cause elephantiasis or blindness.
The woman remembered travelling to a rural area of Russia outside of Moscow where she was bitten a lot of times by mosquitoes.
It is not clear whether the bumps remained in her eye when her lip was swollen – medics reportedly found 'a superficial moving oblong nodule at the left upper eyelid'.
Doctors realised it was a parasite – an organism which lives off another living creature – then held it still with forceps and cut it out of her face. The woman made a full recovery after the procedure.
The worm was later identified as Dirofilaria repens, a type of parasitic filarial worm which is normally found in dogs or other carnivores and is spread by mosquito bites.
This diagnosis of the worms living beneath a person's skin is not unheard of, and was diagnosed 1,272 times between 1997 and 2013 in Russia and Belarus, according to a 2015 study.
The worms lay eggs inside a biting insect such as a mosquito, and they may then be passed onto a mammal and grow into a worm inside its body.
As a parasite, the worms get all the nutrients they need from the body of their host and cannot survive outside the body.
Filarial worms can cause infections such as elephantiasis – in which the parasite gets into the lymph nodes and causes parts of the body to swell up to massive proportions – or river blindness, so-called because it is spread by flies which breed in streams and rivers.
The worms can live for up to eight years and during their life time release millions of larvae into the blood.
Infections caught from these worms are known collectively as filariasis – the World Health Organisation says 856 million people around the world are at risk of the infection.
The unnamed woman went to an eye doctor after the bumps, which she said itched and burned, moved from her eye socket to her lip, making it swell up like a balloon.
She had first noticed a small bump beneath her left eye, then five days later it had moved of its own accord to the top of her eye, just above her eyelid.
It remained there for ten days, before disappearing and then causing her top lip to swell up far beyond its normal size.
Doctors saw the lump was moving, identified it as a parasitic worm and removed it with surgery.
The type of worm which lodged itself in the woman's eye are the kind which can enter people's immune system and cause elephantiasis or blindness.
The woman remembered travelling to a rural area of Russia outside of Moscow where she was bitten a lot of times by mosquitoes.
It is not clear whether the bumps remained in her eye when her lip was swollen – medics reportedly found 'a superficial moving oblong nodule at the left upper eyelid'.
Doctors realised it was a parasite – an organism which lives off another living creature – then held it still with forceps and cut it out of her face. The woman made a full recovery after the procedure.
The worm was later identified as Dirofilaria repens, a type of parasitic filarial worm which is normally found in dogs or other carnivores and is spread by mosquito bites.
This diagnosis of the worms living beneath a person's skin is not unheard of, and was diagnosed 1,272 times between 1997 and 2013 in Russia and Belarus, according to a 2015 study.
The worms lay eggs inside a biting insect such as a mosquito, and they may then be passed onto a mammal and grow into a worm inside its body.
As a parasite, the worms get all the nutrients they need from the body of their host and cannot survive outside the body.
Filarial worms can cause infections such as elephantiasis – in which the parasite gets into the lymph nodes and causes parts of the body to swell up to massive proportions – or river blindness, so-called because it is spread by flies which breed in streams and rivers.
The worms can live for up to eight years and during their life time release millions of larvae into the blood.
Infections caught from these worms are known collectively as filariasis – the World Health Organisation says 856 million people around the world are at risk of the infection.
Music: "Unwritten Return" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Source: NEJM , Daily Mail, Live Science
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