Chinese doctors remove pair of 10cm live worms from woman’s arm after year-long pain

Doctors in southern China had to remove two 10cm-long living worms from the arm of an anguished woman after she reported a big lump.The woman, surnamed Wang, said the lump, which first appeared on her arm a year ago, got bigger and bigger. Eventually, it ballooned to the size of a quail egg.Wang said the sharp pain from the swollen mass prompted her to seek medical treatment at Shenzhen People’s Hospital in Guangdong province, reported Shenzhen TV.Doctors said the two worms taken out of Wang’s arm were sparganum, a type of parasite commonly found in the bodies of people with an unhealthy lifestyle.Wang recalled that she often cooked frogs at home, killing them on the same chopping board that she used to prepare cold dishes.According to the doctors at the hospital, Wang’s kitchen knife and chopping board might have been polluted by sparganum cysts.As she prepared the cold dishes on the board, the cysts were probably attached to the chopped food and as a result had entered people’s bodies.“Unlike other parasites, sparganums would not mature into adults while in the human body; instead, they just move around among various tissues,” said an unidentified doctor from the Shenzhen hospital’s dermatological department.The above is an X-ray image of the type of worm that was removed from Wang. Photo: Weibo“They may go into the hypodermis, muscles, eyes, chest, brain and viscera. The most common symptom is lumps under the skin,” the doctor added.“Do not let carelessness in your kitchen become a loophole for parasites,” warned the doctor.Wang’s habit of using the same chopping board for preparing both the raw and cooked food is not rare in China because many people believe cleaning the board with detergent can root out the parasite eggs.A collection of frogs in a fishing net after they were caught for cooking. Photo: EPA-EFECases involving worms taken out of the bodies of patients often make headlines in China.Further ReadingIn April, surgeons, also in Guangdong, removed an 8cm-long worm from a woman’s brain after she suffered from multiple mystery health problems.She suspected the parasite was caused by a combination of high-risk habits: placing a raw frog’s leg inside a tooth cavity to treat a toothache decades ago, frequently drinking untreated mountain spring water, or consuming medicinal snake wineA similar incident unfolded in May in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in southwestern China, where doctors retrieved a 5cm-long worm from a man’s brain. The man admitted he often drank untreated mountain water and drank raw pig’s blood.