Young Christian minister finds worm as it crawls across his eye during a church service-an ER hospital visit confirmed that worms had literally been crawling under his skin and eye for nearly two years.
An young and seemingly healthy, 25-year-old Christian minister, Orellana, visited an Oakland, California, hospital emergency room in September 2008, complaining of something in his eye. The cause turns out to be far worse than he, or anyone else, probably imagined--turns out there was something in his eye--something alive, like a worm.
Now being discussed in a case study in this month’s issue of The Annals of Emergency Medicine, Orellana was unknowingly suffering from an infection called "loaiasis", a skin and eye disease involving larvae and worms. Loaiasis is caused by the loa loa, name for a parasitic worm endemic to West and Central Africa. That worm can travel through the skin and even eyeballs.
A couple of years prior in 2006, the Christian minister had spent 12 days in Equatorial Guinea of Central Africa. Orellana was focused on preaching and helping out some missionary friends-but ended up with more than he bargained for, namely a worm in his eye.
Sometime while in Central Africa, the California minister had apparently been bitten by a deer fly. The deer fly transmits disease to humans, and the fly’s bite apparently deposited larvae into his bloodstream. The larvae then grew into worms-worms that crawled through Orellana's skin-and even into his eye.
The worms grew in the minister's bloodstream for almost two years, unnoticed until one Sunday during a church service. “I started feeling like there was something in my eyeball, like there was a piece of dust in my eye,” says Orellana, now 27 and living with his wife in Oakland. Half a day later the feeling in his eye was still bothering him, so he and his wife took a closer look in a mirror-to find what looked like a white squiggle.
“In the white part of the eye there was an “s”-looking swivel,” says Orellana. He says his wife actually said it looked like a worm, but neither thought something that horrifying. ER doctors that initial analysis in the hospital emergency room that night. “It was very small; you saw something like an ‘s’ moving around. It was pretty freaky,” he says. Not river blindness, or "onchocerciasis", "loaiasis" infections fortunately don’t damage vision.
The worm crawling across the eyeball can be irritating and painful--and creepy. “It can affect vision mainly because of local irritation; in general, the worm itself will usually migrate out of the eye eventually … unless you get repeat, repeat infections [of the loaiasis],” says Dr. Moffett, an emergency medicine doctor at Alameda County Medical Hospital in Oakland, CA.
Worst-case scenarios with loaiasis infections can damage the brain, heart or kidneys.
Turns out a lot of people have the worm infections-doctors estimate 12 to 13 million people have loaiasis infections, mostly in West and Central Africa, and are infected with the African eye worm. Only about 10 loaiasis cases per year appear in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control. After Orellana arrived in the California ER, he was treated with an oral medication called diethylcarbamazine, to kill the worms.