Last year, I wrote about a 35-year-old man with worms swimming around in his eyeball. It sounds like the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen often, yet we are back here today with a similar case report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, via Ars Technica. This time, our patient is a 71-year-old South Korean farmer who had mating worms in his eyes that had to be removed before they could give birth to larvae, which would’ve made matters significantly worse.
The farmer spent agonizing months bent over, feeling like something was stuck in his eyes. When ophthalmologists finally took a look, they found 11 roundworms on his conjunctiva that were eroding his corneal cells. The parasites were identified as Thelazia callipaeda, a species that usually infects dogs and cats but occasionally pops itself into human peepers.
Doctors Discovered 11 Worms in a Man’s Eye, and They Were About to Multiply
The thought of having a worm in your eye is bad enough, but these little guys are a nightmare: they first enter via a fly that lands near an eyeball, where the larva disembarks and makes itself at home.
They grow and then start hooking up with each other to propagate their disgusting species. If you remove them in time, they can give birth to a ton of larvae, and suddenly your problem goes from a few worms to dozens swimming around in your eye.
The doctors numbed the farmer’s eyes and then carefully plucked out 11 adult nematodes, some as long as 22 millimeters. When examined under a microscope, they found that the female worms were already pregnant and were in the middle of popping out larvae as they were being extracted.
Doctors removed the worms just in time, allowing the farmer to fully recover within two months.
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