‘We all felt a bit sick’: Australian doctors find live parasitic worm in woman's brain

A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain.

Transcript

00:00 A live parasitic roundworm has been pulled out of a woman`s brain in Australia. While

00:05 it was still wriggling, the stomach churning discovery was the first time a worm of this

00:10 type has been discovered in any mammal, including humans, as they are usually found in the brains

00:16 of snakes.

00:17 If you think of the human brain, which is, I mean, quite big, but not huge, and this

00:23 one was eight centimeters long, and it was alive and wriggling when our poor, but very

00:31 skilled neurosurgeon took it out with some forceps.

00:35 One theory is that the woman was infected after foraging for edible shrubs near her

00:39 house. The 64-year-old is being observed by doctors in case the worm had left behind eggs,

00:45 potentially causing further trouble.

00:47 [Whoosh]