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Doctors in China were surprised to discover a parasitic infection had caused live worms to grow under a woman’s right eyelid. They aren’t sure how the worms got there, but the woman’s cat is one of the main suspects.
Her case was recently studied in a new report published in the journal BMC Ophthalmology. In the report, it is revealed that the 41-year-old woman first visited a doctor complaining that it felt like there was something irritating her right eye.
Upon examination, the doctor noticed damage to the woman’s cornea and prescribed her some eye drops. They didn’t work.
Around a month later, the woman went back to the doctor still complaining about her right eye being red and itchy and feeling like there was some sort of foreign body in it.
During that examination, the doctor saw that the tissue below her right upper eyelid was inflamed, and upon a closer look discovered four live, white worms underneath her eyelid.
According to Emily Cooke, a neuroscientist and health news writer for Live Science, “After applying an anesthetic to the area, the team used forceps to carefully remove the worms from the woman’s eye and sent the samples to the laboratory for analysis. Under the microscope, the team saw that the worms had slender, elongated bodies that were covered in what looked like minuscule cut marks. There was a mouth-like structure on one end of each body, and the other end was spiky.”
Later testing on the worms revealed them to be Thelazia callipaeda, also known as Oriental eye worms, which are often responsible for a parasitic disease called thelaziasis. The report in BMC Ophthalmology states thelaziasis “can cause mild to severe signs and lesions, such as foreign body sensation, itching, tearing, eye pain, conjunctival bleeding, conjunctivitis, corneal ulcers, and even blindness.”
“Thelaziasis is typically transmitted to animals by flies that feed on the tears of cattle and domestic animals, such as dogs and cats; as they feed, the flies release T. callipaeda larvae into the animals’ eyes,” Cooke explained. “Once inside an eye, the larvae develop into adult worms that reproduce, creating new larvae that are ready to be ingested and transmitted by another fly, thus continuing the transmission cycle.”
The woman’s doctor was unable to pinpoint the exact cause of her getting thelaziasis, but she did have an American shorthair cat that had an “eye disease.” Unfortunately, she refused to allow her cat to be examined to identify if it was the culprit.
After using some antibiotic eye ointment, the woman’s eye infection appeared to have been completely eradicated after two months.
“This case highlights the thelaziasis in urban settings, emphasizing the need for ophthalmologists to consider parasitic infections in differential diagnosis even in well-maintained environments,” the researchers wrote in their report.