Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Cattle eyeball worms found in second human, raising worry of wriggly uprising

#1
C C Offline
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/...-uprising/

EXCERPT: A 68-year-old Nebraska woman has become the second human in history to discover parasitic cattle worms wriggling around her eyeballs. The cringy case—which surfaced just two years after the first case in Oregon—raises concern that the worms may be angling for an uprising in the United States.

In a recent report in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that the worm—Thelazia gulosa, aka the cattle eye worm—has been in the US since the 1940s. [...] T. gulosa is a parasitic nematode known to infest the eyes of cattle in the United States and Southern Canada, as well as Europe, Asia, and Australia. The worms move from eye to eye via face flies, aka Musca autumnalis, which feast on tears. Both the flies and the hitchhiking worms were introduced to the US immediately after World World II and the infectious cycle began.

Generally, the worms' journey goes like this: worm larvae floating around an eyeball gets picked up by a fly while they're sucking down the tears of their victim. Those larvae grow and molt in the fly's tissues before reaching an infective stage. At that point, they migrate to the fly's mouth parts and wait to be delivered to a new eyeball. Once in a peeper, they prefer to hang out between the eyeball and the eyelid but can move around, causing scarring and other issues. [...] Infectious disease experts at the CDC suspect the woman picked up the infection while she was trail running in a regional park in Carmel Valley, California, which is where she spends her winters. She told the researchers that on one run she remembered rounding a corner and colliding head-on with a swarm of small flies. (MORE - details)
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  1st time: Microplastics found in human blood + Can poisonous snail replace morphine? C C 0 65 Mar 25, 2022 05:44 PM
Last Post: C C
  Autistic women greatly understudied + Don't worry about new cellphone study (cancer) C C 0 334 Nov 2, 2018 02:56 AM
Last Post: C C



Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)