Cattle eyeball worms found in second human, raising worry of wriggly uprising

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A 68-year-old Nebraska woman has become the second human in history to discover parasitic cattle worms wriggling around her eyeballs.

The cringy case-which surfaced just two years after the first case in Oregon-raises concern that the worms may be angling for an uprising in the United States.

In a recent report in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that the worm-Thelazia gulosa, aka the cattle eye worm-has been in the US since the 1940s. "The reasons for this species only now infecting humans remain obscure," they write. But "[t]hat a second human infection with T. gulosa has occurred within two years of the first suggest that this may represent an emerging zoonotic disease in the United States."

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