Woman Sneezes Out Maggots After Fly Larvae Get Trapped in Her Deviated Septum
Freeman writes:
A 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.
Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human's schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don't actually develop.
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For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn't complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman's case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium-the hard casing of a pupa-in the woman's nose.
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On a hot and dry September day, she recalled a swarm of flies bombarding her face. About a week later, she had facial pain and then developed a cough over the next two to three weeks. Those were her only symptoms until October 15, when she sneezed and reported that "worms" came out of her nose. They were, in fact, late-stage sheep bot fly larvae.She had surgery to remove the mucus munchers, which recovered 10 larvae at various stages and a pupa.
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"From a purely anatomic perspective, we hypothesize that the combination of high larval numbers and septum deviation impeded normal egress from the nasal passages, permitting progression to the [third larval stage] and, in 1 instance, pupation," they wrote. In other words, there were so many maggots in her crooked nasal passage that they created a bottleneck on their way out, allowing some to stay longer than usual.
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The experts note that, in a way, the woman was lucky. In animals, the third-stage larvae can't pupate when they become trapped in the sinuses. Instead, they either dry out, liquify, or calcify, which can all lead to secondary bacterial infections.
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