People if you’re planning to take a trip out of the country, it’s recommended precautions be taken to avoid walking into swarms of flies or flying insects because they carry diseases or they can take up residence in a person’s ear canal and lay their eggs.
A report on News.Sky.Com stated some information I felt needed to be passed to readers who may be traveling to a foreign country. I believe this information is a vital tool for warning people what actually happened to a 27-year-old British woman, Rochelle Harris, who was on holiday with her boyfriend in Peru, South America from the UK.
When the woman returned home from her trip, she began to suffer from severe headaches with sharp pains running down one side of her face and she was hearing sounds in her head. She woke one day to find that her pillow was soaked in fluid running from her ear. Harris knew she needed to seek a professionals diagnoses.
Doctors at the A&E in Derby thought it was only an ear infection and referred her to an ear, nose and throat (ENT) team. Harris asked the doctor if he saw anything in her ear, he replied, “He would rather speak to the registrar before telling her, but she did have a small hole located in the ear canal and after discussing it with the registrar he would tell her the other diagnoses.”
This frightened Harris as the ENT doctor told her and she asked the doctor, “Please tell me,” and the doctor replied, “You’ve got maggots in your ear? Harris burst out in tears and said, “I’m terrified and I wonder if the maggots have gotten in my brain, this could be serious.”
The doctor recommended an emergency brain scan for Harris and it showed there was “no” damage to the ear drum, blood vessels or the facial nerves. He then indicated that they had found that maggots had chewed a 12mm hole in her ear canal.
The doctor tried to drown the maggots by flooding them with olive oil but the pesky maggots managed to survive as they removed two of them from Harris` ear. The examination discovered there were “still” eight maggots in Harris` ear.
After the doctors removed the maggots they sent them to a laboratory for analysis and they discovered that a New World screwworm fly had made its home in Harris` ear canal and it had laid its eggs there too.
Harris told the doctors that she remembered a day in Peru where she had walked through a swarm of flies; and she remembered brushing away a fly that she felt had landed inside her ear.
The doctors told Harris he didn’t believe she would suffer any lasting problems, and she said, “I just wanted them out of me and after I found out what was causing all the sensations and sounds in my head it only made it worse; and I’m not as squeamish as I use to be about bugs, but how I could be when I’ve had maggots living inside of my head?”
Harris` story is featured on a new Discovery Channel documentary called, “Bugs, Bites and Parasites.”
Barbara Kasey Smith is the writer of this article & it was based on a report in News.Sky.Com.
Source:
News Sky.Com