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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNoises 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 810 mm (0.30.4 inch), and share many characteristics of the common house fly. About 1221 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 Cochliomyias common name, the screwworm, because they possess small spines on each body segment that resemble a screws 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 animals tissue. After 57 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]
lumberjack_jeff
(33,224 posts)I really wish I hadn't read that.
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)and came up with this story.
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)They used sterile males to mate with fertile females. It was an amazing success and used no toxic sprays - in the 1960s.
jberryhill
(62,444 posts)Got Kate Middleton beat by seven!
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)that is the question.
Control-Z
(15,682 posts)onehandle
(51,122 posts)Wildlife varieties, including bugs, are moving north from Mexico and Florida.
George Zimmerman apparently is once again free to cross borders, so there's that too.
libodem
(19,288 posts)The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,702 posts)Reminds me of that old episode of Night Gallery involving an earwig... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660818/reviews
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)johnp3907
(3,731 posts)jazzimov
(1,456 posts)One of the scariest shows I've ever seen on TV or in the movies. Still gives me the shakes.
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Spoiler alert!
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"it was a female; they lay eggs"
dipsydoodle
(42,239 posts)Solly Mack
(90,767 posts)Nightmare bug!
johnp3907
(3,731 posts)PD Turk
(1,289 posts)Pretty well documented here
cali
(114,904 posts)which had evidently crawled into my ear at night and was bumping around next to my ear drum. I was taking a class on Victorian theater at the time and had a huge crush on my professor. I was trying to hold an intelligent conversation with him and there was this awful thing going on in my ear.
The doc flushed it out with a syringe of warm water. It was surprisingly large.
KittyWampus
(55,894 posts)cali
(114,904 posts)I never thought of that but it does, now that you mention it- weirdly appropriate in an Edward Gorey kind of way.
MyshkinCommaPrince
(611 posts)What? I can't hear you!
Cleita
(75,480 posts)Brrr!. It's one of the reasons, I don't care for tropical climates. It's all the variety of bug pests than can get you.