“And the worms / ate into his brain” line from Pink Floyd…better a dead one than half a live one.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once admitted he was suffering mental problems owing to a worm eating part of his brain. If the brain worm is causing him to espouse right-wing views that pull votes from Donald Trump, that worm is a hero.
When a 64-year-old Australian woman was sent to hospital for brain surgery, neurosurgeon Dr. Hari Priya Bandi was not expecting to pull out a live 8-centimeter (3-inch) long parasitic roundworm that wriggled between her forceps.
“I’ve only come across worms using my not-so-good gardening skills … I find them terrifying and this is not something I deal with at all,” Bandi told CNN of the world’s first discovery of a live worm inside a human brain.
The finding unleashed a mad scramble to find out what exactly the parasite was, Canberra Hospital infectious disease expert Sanjaya Senanayake told CNN.
One colleague in the hospital lab was able to reach an animal parasitology expert at a governmental scientific research agency just 20 minutes away – and found their unexpected answer.
“We were able to send the live wiggling worm to him, and he was able to look at it and immediately identify it,” Senanayake said.
Molecular tests confirmed it was Ophidascaris robertsi, a roundworm usually found in pythons, according to a press release from the Australian National University and the Canberra Hospital.
www.cnn.com/...
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