Noises in tourist's head were from flesh-eating maggots
(Reuters) - A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head to be told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.
Rochelle Harris, 27, said she remembered dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but thought nothing more of it until she started getting headaches and pains down one side of her face and woke up in Britain one morning with liquid on her pillow.
Thinking she had a routine ear infection caused by a mosquito bite, she sought medical treatment at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England, where a consultant noticed maggots in a small hole in her ear-canal.
"I was very scared. Were they in my brain?" said Harris, recounting her ordeal in a new Discovery Channel documentary series called "Bugs, Bites and Parasites" to be aired in the UK from July 21.
Doctors tried first to flush the maggots out of the ear using olive oil.
"It was the longest few hours that I have ever had to wait... I could still feel them and hear them and knowing what those scratching sounds were, and knowing what that wriggling feeling was, that just made it all the worse," she said.
When flushing the maggots out failed, the medics resorted to surgery and found a "writhing mass of maggots" within her ear, raising concern they could eat into her brain.
The surgery removed a family of eight maggots. Analysis found that a New World Army Screw Worm fly had laid eggs inside Harris's ear.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/17/odd-maggots-idUSL6N0FN33E20130717
Unlike most other maggots, the hominivorax maggots will attack and consume healthy living tissue along with decaying tissue (hominivorax literally translates to “man eating”). The New World screwworm fly can grow to an average size of 8–10 mm (0.3–0.4 inch), and share many characteristics of the common house fly. About 12–21 hours after the larvae hatch, they crawl into the wound and immediately begin to feed and burrow into the flesh. The hominivorax larvae are responsible for Cochliomyia’s common name, the screwworm, because they possess small spines on each body segment that resemble a screw’s threads. After the larvae hatch from the eggs they will dive head first into whatever food source, and burrow deeper perpendicular to the skin surface eating into live flesh, again resembling a screw being driven into an object. The larvae will then continue to feed on the wound fluids and the animal’s tissue. After 5–7 days, the larvae grow and depart from the wound to burrow into the soil and pupate. The pupal period varies from a week to upwards of 2 months, depending on the soil temperature. Adults breed only once during their lifetime, which is close to 20 days.[4]
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Nightmare bug!
I never thought of that but it does, now that you mention it- weirdly appropriate in an Edward Gorey kind of way.
