For the first time in the world, a worm has been found in the brain of an Australian woman. The “threadlike” worm was removed from the patient’s damaged frontal lobe during surgery in Canberra last year, but the phenomenon has only now been revealed.
“It was not at all what we expected. Everyone was shocked,” confessed surgeon Hari Priya Bandi, quoted by the BBC.
The patient, a 64-year-old woman, had been suffering from symptoms such as stomach aches, coughing, and night sweats for months, which progressed to memory loss and depression. She was admitted to the hospital in late January 2021, and an examination revealed “an atypical lesion in the right frontal lobe of the brain.”
However, the cause of his condition was not revealed until a biopsy in June 2022 and doctors admit that the red parasite may have been alive in his brain for two months. Now the woman, who lives in an area of south-eastern New South Wales, is recovering well.
Researchers from the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, which published the case, believe that it is the first case of invasion and development of a larva in the human brain. They later discovered that it was the roundworm Ophidascaris robertsi, which is common in carpet pythons, non-venomous snakes found throughout much of Australia.
The scientists said the woman probably contracted the roundworm after picking a type of native grass, warrigal leaves, next to a lake near where she lives. The area is also inhabited by carpeted pythons.
Given this case, Dr. Senanayake, who is also an associate professor of medicine at the Australian National University (ANU), stressed that this case is a warning, since in the last 30 years and three quarters 30 new types of infections. They are zoonotic and infectious diseases that passed from animals to humans.
“This shows that as the human population grows, we approach and invade animal habitats. This is a problem we see time and time again, whether it’s the Nipah virus, which has spread from wild bats to domestic pigs and then to people, either a coronavirus like Sars and Mers, which went from bats to a secondary animal and then to humans.Although Covid is now slowly disappearing, it is very important that epidemiologists and governments make sure that have good infectious disease surveillance,” Senanayake added.
Source: TSF
