Surgeons remove worm from inside woman's eye

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Surgeons remove worm from inside womans eye

Uttar Pradesh - The doctors saw a 'coiled up thread-like structure which was moving'.

By Web Report

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Published: Tue 27 Mar 2018, 1:23 PM

Last updated: Tue 27 Mar 2018, 3:29 PM

Doctors in India were shocked to discover a long white worm wriggling in a 42-year-old woman's eye after she complained of immense pain. The woman, identified as Shravasti from a village in Uttar Pradesh, had to undergo nasal surgery to remove the worm that had lodged itself just behind her cornea.
The woman went for a check-up at the Ophthalmology Outpatient Department at King George's Medical University in July 2016 after she started experiencing intense pain and impaired vision around her eye.
Doctors there gave her a slit-lamp examination, during which they identified that her eyes were extremely bloodshot and the iris was inflamed, according to reports in the Daily Mail.
On closer inspection, the doctors saw a 'coiled up thread-like structure which was moving'. They administered topical anesthesia to paralyse the worm, which was a little under a centimeter long, and removed it by going through the woman's nose, according to a report published in BMJ Case Reports. Shravasti's symptoms vanished after the surgery, the report stated.
The extracted worm was sent to the Microbiology Department at the university where scientists identified it as a Loa Loa worm, typically found in West Africa but is extremely rare in India.  
The Loa Loa worm is also known as the 'African eye worm' because it commonly migrates to the eye while the larvae are usually transmitted to humans by a few species of biting flies, like the deer fly, in West and Central Africa. The larvae mature in the human body and can migrate all over the body with some reported to have been found in the eyes, nose, and genitals.
Though Loa infections are most common in West and central Africa, there have been a few cases in India before. A 48-year old man from Assam had a male Loa Loa worm removed in 2005, as did a woman from the Kumayun district in the Himalayas.


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