8cm worm found alive in a woman's brain, find out how it got there

A woman in Australia had been suffering from stomach pain, cough and night sweats for months before her symptoms worsened into forgetfulness and depression. The woman, 64, was admitted to hospital in Canberra in late January 2021. She had a scan which showed ‘an atypical lesion within the right frontal lobe of the brain’.

However, it was only in June 2022 that medical professionals decided to perform a biopsy to find out the cause of this woman’s condition. What they found inside her head was unimaginable. As the operating surgeon Dr Hari Priya Bandi explained: ‘It was definitely not what we were expecting'. Everyone was shocked’.

A first in medical history

During the operation, Dr Bandi reached out to touch the part of the brain that had showed up as unusual on the scan. She couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but as soon as she made contact with the tissue, she could tell it felt funny. She grabbed her forceps and pulled out a worm that continued to writhe, dangling from the tips of her tweezers.

The animal was alive and well, and wiggling ‘vigorously’:

I pulled it out... and it was happily moving

It has since been confirmed that the worm was 8cm long. Dr Bandi had never seen anything like it, so she sought the advice of Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious diseases expert. Senanayake explained that this was the first recorded case of this happening:

Even if you take away the yuck factor, this is a new infection never documented before in a human being.

Medical staff have speculated that the worm could have been alive in her brain as she went about her life for up to two months.

Read more:Woman left horrified after finding a wriggling worm inside her salmon filets

How the worm got in her brain

Researchers have warned that this is yet another case that demonstrates the dangers of diseases and infections being passed from animals to humans. We’ve all heard about the coronavirus coming from a bat and just yesterday, a professor in Scotland warned us about a potential bird flu pandemic.

The worm has been identified as the Ophidascaris robertsi - a type of roundworm which is commonly found in the non-venomous carpet pythons that live in many parts of Australia. Scientists reckon the woman caught the worm while collecting grasses by a lake near where she lived in New South Wales.

The journal that reported the case, Emerging Infectious Diseases, believes the woman became an ‘accidental host’ for her wriggly visitor after cooking with the grasses which are thought to have been contaminated by python faeces and parasite eggs.

This brings to mind the dangers of foraging, especially after a story broke earlier this month about an ill-fated family meal that contained ‘death cap’ mushrooms and left 3 dead.

Though both of these stories give us the heebie geebies, there is a happy ending to today’s tale: post-surgery, the woman who had a worm in her brain is recovering well.

Read more:

⋙ Woman pulls 14 worms out of her eye after it got irritated (VIDEO)

⋙ This woman's head is three times larger than normal due to this rare disease

Sources used:

BBC: Live worm found in Australian woman's brain in world first

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Emerging Infectious Diseases