Ophidascaris robertsi is a roundworm usually found in pythons. The Canberra hospital patient marks the world-first case of the parasite being found in humans.
The patient resides near a lake area inhabited by carpet pythons. Despite no direct snake contact, she often collected native grasses, including warrigal greens, from around the lake to use in cooking, Senanayake said.
The doctors and scientists involved in her case hypothesise that a python may have shed the parasite via its faeces into the grass. They believe the patient was probably infected with the parasite directly from touching the native grass or after eating the greens.
Moral of the story: make sure you wash all the snake shit off your produce and hands before eating.
It's too bad that the brain doesn't have the capability to feel itself. Imagine the fun of having a little buddy wiggling through your thoughts.
Maybe it'd even tickle :3
A past team member of mine had a client who kept telling providers that she "has worms in my brain." Multiple providers discounted the medical relevance of this individual's claims as delusions due to her schizophrenia-spectrum disorder and her low level of function.
My team member fought the providers like hell to get her an fMRI. Well the fMRI showed her brain was riddled with at that point inoperable tumors, and she died not long afterwards.
I'd heard other accounts of similar stories, but that was the first real-world example I had. If I had a client telling me there were ants in his belly, I'm not going to believe that's accurate, but I made damn sure we addressed it with providers.
People can describe physical symptoms in seemingly bizarre ways. Even if the exact scenario they are describing is clearly false, it doesn't mean they aren't experiencing very real physical symptoms.
Reminds me of an episode of one of those medical shows where a nonverbal autistic kid keeps trying to tell everyone he's got worms in his eyes but he can only tell them by drawing the worms so it just looks like a bunch of squiggly lines on paper.
Or shutter island when DiCaprio is talking about his dead wife saying she had a bug in her brain before going crazy and killing their kids.
That poor patient, she was so courageous and wonderful,” Senanayake said. “You don’t want to be the first patient in the world with a roundworm found in pythons and we really take our hats off to her. She’s been wonderful.
"The patient resides near a lake area inhabited by carpet pythons. Despite no direct snake contact, she often collected native grasses, including warrigal greens, from around the lake to use in cooking, Senanayake said.
The doctors and scientists involved in her case hypothesise that a python may have shed the parasite via its faeces into the grass. They believe the patient was probably infected with the parasite directly from touching the native grass or after eating the greens."
oh I got the answer after reading the article. the lady gathers plants from an area where the snakes live to cook with, so they think maybe there were some live larve in some snake poop that she accidentally mixed into her cooking and ate