![]() When an infected mosquito sips your blood, the parasitic larvae latch on to your skin and enter through the bite wound. The mosquito picks up the larvae from a host: "dogs and other carnivores." It all starts with a bite from a mosquito that's carrying the worm's larvae, says Natalia Pshenichnaya, a physician who studies infectious diseases at Rostov State Medical University in Rostov, Russia. How did a worm end up beneath a woman's skin? In her gruesome case described and shown through pictures on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the woman in Moscow had to have the worm surgically removed from her lip. It is a very real possibility - and a recent reality for one woman infected with Dirofilaria repens, a parasitic worm of the Old World. (Anyone remember that one scene from the movie Alien?)īut this, my friends, is no nightmare. It wriggles and writhes across your face, seemingly ready to rip out of your skin at any second. One morning you wake up and something is crawling beneath your skin. It sounds like a scene straight out of a nightmare. ![]() The paper says a physician used a forceps to remove the worm (also shown above). She soon noticed a nodule moving around her face, which she documented with the above photos. The paper says a Moscow woman visited a rural area and was bitten by mosquitoes. The New England Journal of Medicine uses selfies in a paper describing a parasitic worm called Dirofilaria repens.
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