It was a literal case of earworms.
A Portuguese man was shocked and revulsed after discovering that his innocuous-seeming “earache” was caused by a family of maggots that had colonized his hearing canal. A case study detailing the puke-inducing infestation was published late last month in the New England Journal Of Medicine.
According to the paper, the 64-year-old patient had reported to the Hospital Pedro Hispano in Matosinhos after experiencing “pain, itching, and bleeding in the left ear” for five days.
A subsequent examination revealed that the man’s auditory passage was infested with “numerous mobile larvae” — which had even perforated part of his eardrum, Jam Press reported. The accompanying footage shows a swarm of the interloping disco rice wriggling about in the poor soul’s ear like a scene out of the Animal Planet docuseries “Monsters Inside Me.”
Presiding physician and case study co-author Catarina Rato reported that the larvae’s “cylindrical, segmented, white-yellow colored body” were consistent with the pupae of a New World screw fly.
These revolting parasites, which reside in Central and South America, survive by taking up residence in “all warm-blooded animals, including humans,” according to the international atomic agency.
According to the site, the females lay up to 400 eggs in animal wounds and “on soft tissues such as the nose, navel and anus.” After the larvae hatch, they tunnel through flesh and create bacterial infections, which in turn attract more egg-laying females — a condition known as myiasis.
Despite the maggots’ small size, this disease can turn fatal if left untreated.
Thankfully, doctors were able to kill the maggots and disinfect the area with a combination of antibiotic ear drops, boric acid solution and oral antibiotics. They then special forceps to remove the dead larvae after irrigating the area with water.
The man was rendered maggot-free within seven days.
The patient was lucky that the larvae weren’t dead or decomposing in his deep tissues, in which case he have may required surgery to remove them.
This isn’t the first time someone’s body has been turned into a grub hub. In 2019, doctors in India removed hundreds of differently sized cysts from a woman’s stomach. Her gastrointestinal interlopers turned out to be tapeworm babies, which had caused her stomach to swell like a giant parasite piñata.