A live 8 centimeter worm removed from a human brain, neurosurgeons around the world had never seen before. In June 2022, surgeon Hari Priya Bandi was performing a biopsy through a hole in the skull of a 64-year-old patient at hospital in Canberra, Australia, when she used forceps to extract the parasite.
The creature was the larva of a roundworm native to Australia, named Ophidascaris robertsi. These worms are commonly found in carpet pythons or kangaroos, but have never been detected in humans. Even though this woman had no direct contact with snakes, scientists hypothesize that she consumed “inadvertently eggs ofO. robertsi either directly from the vegetation, or indirectly by contamination of his hands or kitchen equipment”.
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