'We all felt a bit sick': Surgeons pull live worm from woman's brain in world’s first case of new parasitic infection
manchestereveningnews.co.ukA surgeon in Australia was shocked when she removed an eight-centimetre worm from a patient's brain that had been causing 'mysterious symptoms.' The 64-year-old woman had experienced abdominal pain, diarrhoea, fever, cough and shortness of breath, and eventually forgetfulness and depression.
An MRI scan showed abnormalities, but it was when surgeon Hari Priya Bandi was performing a biopsy through a hole in her skull at Canberra Hospital last year that the parasite, which was 3in (8cm) long, was discovered. “I just thought ‘What is that?
It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s alive and moving’,” Dr Bandi was quoted as saying in The Canberra Times newspaper on Tuesday. “It continued to move with vigour.
We all felt a bit sick,” she added of her operating team. Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features. The creature was the larva of an Australian native roundworm not previously known to be a human parasite, named Ophidascaris robertsi.
Read more on manchestereveningnews.co.uk
