It literally made his skin crawl.
A sewer worker in Spain had the internet gagging after he showed up at the hospital with worms squirming about under his skin, as detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The 64-year-old sewer treatment employee had reportedly realized something was awry after experiencing mild diarrhea and an itchy rash, Jam Press reported. He reported to the University Hospital in Madrid, where doctors revealed that the man had contracted Strongyloides stercoralis, a species of parasitic roundworm that lives in tropical and subtropical regions throughout the globe.
These nematodes are reportedly transmitted through contact between human skin and contaminated soil, the World Health Organization writes. They then “penetrate the human host and reach the intestine where they mature into adults and produce eggs,” according to the website.
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And while it’s yet unclear how the sanitation worker got infected, physicians point out that the man “worked in sewage management and lived all his life in an urban region of Spain.”
Strongyloides is generally asymptomatic, often going undetected for years — which doctors suspect was initially the case with said sanitation man. However, he was then administered hormone therapy for malignant spinal cord compression. This had the unfortunate side effect of suppressing his immune system, effectively causing the parasites to proliferate.
As a result, the patient went into a state of hyperinfection, a potentially fatal condition in which the abundance of larvae can trigger sepsis and organ failure. It reportedly snowballed to the point where the nematodes were literally wriggling about under his skin like something out of the movie “Slither.”
Accompanying photos show red welt-like rashes riddling the man’s skin. Also present are cartoonish-looking squiggles, which were drawn by doctors to indicate the initial sites of infection like a police chalk outline for parasites, Futurism reported.
The larvae were reportedly also visible in the sewage treater’s stool samples.
Thankfully, medics were able to ameliorate the man’s Strongyloidiasis with powerful anti-parasitic drugs. “After treatment with oral Ivermectin, the patient’s rash and diarrhoea subsided,” a hospital spokesperson claimed.