The worms are carried by face flies, which feed on the tears of cattle, horses, and dogs you may have seen them persistently buzzing around an animal’s eyes. He had to dig out a German research paper from 1928 to finally identify the species as Thelazia gulosa, making it the third species of Thelazia to turn up in a human eye, along with a species in Asia and one in California. “All these parasites are rare, and this one is extremely rare,” says of Beckley’s eye worm. “When you don’t know what it is, it ends up on our table,” Bradbury says. They analyzed nearly 6,700 mystery samples last year alone. That worm and several more pulled from her eye made their way to Richard Bradbury, who leads the CDC’s Parasitology Reference Diagnostic Laboratory, the nation’s primary resource for identifying rare parasites. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Ophthalmologists managed to snag one of the worms from Beckley’s eye, although it broke in half, and they sent the pieces to the U.S. “He freaked out and jumped back, and was like, Oh my god, I saw it! I just saw it!”Īs for Beckley, “she handled it all with remarkable grace and stride, and is incredibly strong,” says Erin Bonura, the infectious disease specialist at OHSU who treated her. “I’ll never forget when the doctor and the intern saw it wiggle across my eye,” Beckley says. For the next half hour, she sat with hospital staff staring into her eye, waiting for a worm to appear. They seemed a bit skeptical at first, she says, and suggested that maybe what had looked like a worm to her was really just mucus.īut Beckley kept insisting that there were worms in her eye: “I kept thinking, Show yourselves! You have to show yourselves!” she says. Doctors and interns gathered, hoping to see the rare eye worms. Worried about the proximity of the creepy-crawlies to her brain, Beckley decided to return to Portland, where her boyfriend’s father, a doctor, prepared the medical staff at Oregon Health & Science University for her arrival.Īt the hospital, “they basically rolled out the red carpet,” Beckley says. The doctors there were “legitimately freaked out,” Beckley says, but they didn’t know what the worms were or if they were dangerous. “I was just pulling them out, so I knew there were a lot,” she says.īeckley had pulled five more worms from her eye by the time she made it to a doctor in Ketchikan, Alaska. But then more worms started to appear, and it became clear this was a bigger problem. She had seen similar-looking worms in salmon, so Beckley wondered if she’d somehow accidentally transferred one to her eye. The small, nearly transparent creature wriggled for a few seconds, then died. Show Yourselvesīeckley didn’t know any of that as she stared at the worm on her finger in the summer of 2016. The last known case, researchers report today in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, happened more than 20 years ago. What’s more, hers is only the 11th human case of Thelazia eye worms of any species in recorded U.S. Called Thelazia gulosa, the parasitic worm had been seen in cattle eyes-a normal pit stop in its life cycle-but never before in a human’s. When she looked down, she says, “there was a worm on my finger.”īeckley is now the first person in the world known to have been infected with a particular species of eye worm. She screwed up her courage, pulled back her eyelid, pinched the inflamed skin underneath, and gave it a yank. “So one morning, I woke up and I was like, If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to get whatever the heck is in my eye out of there,” Beckley says. The feeling wouldn’t go away, and after about five days, Beckley was frustrated. But try as she might, the 26-year-old couldn’t find a hair-or anything else-in her eye. “It felt like when an eyelash is poking you,” she says. Abby Beckley was salmon fishing in Alaska when she felt something in her left eye.
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