After trip to Kenya, subdermal maggots from ‘bikini bug’
Filed under: Kenya
Topics covered : Animals Attack!, Panic!
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Here’s another one of those stories you never take seriously — until it happens to a woman with a photogenic cleavage. From the Daily Mail comes this story of Alexandra Heminsley’s encounter with a female African tumbu fly:
The trip was a great success, and as I took the taxi to the airport I was pleased to see that I had only one mosquito bite. It was on the inside of my left upper arm, by the seam of my T-shirt. Never mind, I thought, it’s not even itchy: it will be kept cool in the plane’s air conditioning and will be almost gone by the time I’m back…
After 24 sleepless hours, I noticed that the bite was getting larger. By now, it was the size of a grain of rice. I also worried that it had become infected, because it was yellow and hard.
Two days later, I was no longer ill, but the bite was so uniquely painful that I was exhausted by it. It was relentless. It was now very raised, and very yellow. I was as repulsed as I was pained by it…
On my third night back [there] was now a hole at the top of the bite, with what looked like pus; I wiped it clean with a piece of disinfected cotton wool. The pain abated. Twenty minutes later, more movement, more yellow stuff, more agony…
The next morning, I headed to a meeting in North London [and] decided on the spur of the moment to have it dressed by a professional.
A triage nurse saw me quickly. I explained that I’d been bitten by a mosquito in Kenya, and it now seemed infected. I tried to add nonchalantly that I thought the area was wriggling. I didn’t want to be the ‘crazy lady’ of the day.
I needn’t have worried. As I rolled up my sleeve to show the nurse, it became immediately clear to both of us that it was not a mosquito bite. Out of the – now larger – hole popped what appeared to be a small maggot, accompanied by the now familiar wave of pain. I widened my eyes in horror…
It was the larva of the tumbu fly, found anywhere in the tropics from South America and India, through to Australasia and Thailand, and I had a condition known as myiasis, when larvae live and feed on a host…
Jake told me the female tumbu fly likes to lay its eggs on damp clothing or linen. (I remembered leaving my wet T-shirt hanging off the edge of my sunlounger to dry.) If those clothes are then worn, the eggs penetrate the skin. After two or three days, the larvae hatch beneath the skin.
Heminsley was “lucky” the bug was “smart enough” to head out of her arm, but the treatment still makes my stomach squishy. One cannot yank out the larva; it must be coaxed out. Heminsley’s doctor covered the area with Vaseline — and told her to walk around for three hours while the maggot slowly suffocated. He then removed it with tweezers.
Apparently, in Africa such larvae are lured out with bacon.
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Oh that is disgusting!!