A WOMAN has become the first person in the world to have her eyes infested with a parasitic WORM usually found in cattle and dogs.
Abby Beckley, 28, thought she had a stray lash under her eyelid when she was two weeks into a fishing boat trip in Alaska.
In an interview with BuzzFeed News, she said it felt like something was pricking her eye or like a pesky stray eyelash was lodged in there for a week.
Eventually, she decided to investigate and ended up pulling out 14 worms over the course of a few weeks. She also managed to not pass out each time, so props to her!
“I was living with these things, and I’d just keep pulling them out when I’d feel them,” she said.
The worms are actually a parasite called Thelazia gulosa, which are often found in cows. Richard Bradbury, parasitologist from the Center for Disease Control, said she is the first human to get the parasite. How lucky?
So what caused the worms to play house in Beckley’s eyes? Well, they typically live in face flies, which hang around livestock, and a fly most likely landed on her face while she was in Oregon visiting her family and friends who have animals.
Sometimes the worms reproduce on the surface of the cow’s eye and the larvae is stored in tears. Cringe! “They’ll find each other, and you know … it’s very romantic,” Bradbury said.
If Beckley didn’t notice them, the worms could’ve slid further into her eye and caused blindness. Lucky (?) for her, that didn’t happen. The whole incident just gave her pink eye, but probably scarred her for life.
