Neurosurgeon plucks live worm from woman’s brain after months of mysterious symptoms – CBC

Parasite commonly found in carpet pythons

Aug 29, 2023

A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mysterious symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain.

Dr. Hari Priya Bandi was performing a biopsy through a hole in the 64-year-old patient’s skull at Canberra Hospital last year when she used forceps to pull out the parasite, which measured eight centimetres.

“I just thought, ‘What is that? It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s alive and moving,'” Bandi was quoted Tuesday in The Canberra Times newspaper.

“It continued to move with vigour. We all felt a bit sick,” Bandi added of her operating team.

The specimen was the larval form of an Australian native roundworm not previously known to be a human parasite, named Ophidascaris robertsi. The worms are commonly found in carpet pythons.

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/australian-worm-brain-1.6950487