A Melbourne man was discovered to have a long parasitic worm living inside his foot after he went to the doctor complaining of a swollen foot in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The 38-year-old migrant from Sudan went to the doctor after his foot had been giving him trouble for about a year. After showing doctors at St Vincent's Hospital a large abscess on his foot, an X-ray revealed that two pieces of dead parasitic worm had been living inside his foot for years.
Initially, the patient's year-long pain led doctors to believe that the source of his suffering was most likely being caused by an infection, according to The Independent. However, an X-ray found what appeared to be two spaghetti-shaped pieces of "guinea worm" in his ankle and foot, each a few centimeters long.
After surgery was conducted to remove the abscess and pieces of worm, the patient had gone on to make a full recovery, said Dr. Jonathan Darby, an infectious diseases physician at St. Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne.
The centimeters-long parasitic worm, capable of growing up to one meter-long, comes from Africa and can makes its way inside if a human drinks water that contains water fleas infected with guinea worm lava, also known as Dracunculiasis medinensis.
The man could have possibly been infected in Africa before he moved to Australia four years ago, Darby said.
Although it's not infectious, once the African guinea worm gets inside the human body, its larvae travels into the intestines, burrows into the stomach, causes the victim's feet to burn intensely and then tries to emerge through the skin -- leading to blisters or ulcers.
But it is only after a year that symptoms of pain start cropping up, similar to what happened with the 38-year-old patient in Melbourne, UK Mirror reported.
"The worm causes an intense burning sensation in the feet. People want to put their feet into water to relieve the pain," Darby said. "The parasitic worm uses that trick to release larvae in the water, which turns into water fleas that are then ingested by people drinking unsafe water."
"That whole process can take years. It can sit inside the human body alive for years or die, degenerate, and then cause problems in the area like it did for our patient," he added.
Meanwhile, the case was examined in medical journal Pathology.
