She was depressed and forgetful. It was the worm in his brain.

Doctors in Australia discovered a three-inch living parasitic worm in a woman's brain during surgery after she spent more than a year try to find the cause of his distress. .

Australian doctors examined, scanned and tested a woman to find out why she was sick after being hospitalized with abdominal pain and diarrhoea. They weren't prepared for what they discovered.

A three-inch red worm lived in the woman's brain.

The worm was removed last year after doctors spent more than a year trying to find the cause of the woman's distress.

The search for the answer and the alarming discovery, was described this month in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a monthly journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The woman, whom the article identifies as 64 years old. -a former resident of southeast New South Wales, Australia, was admitted to hospital in January 2021 after complaining of diarrhea and abdominal pain for three weeks. She had a dry cough and night sweats.

Scientists and doctors from Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne said in the newspaper article that the woman that she was suffering from a rare lung infection. , but the cause was unknown.

Her symptoms improved with treatment, but weeks later she was hospitalized again, this time with a fever and cough. Doctors then treated her for a group of blood disorders known as hypereosinophilic syndrome, and the drugs they used suppressed her immune system.

For a three-month period in 2022, she experienced forgetfulness and worsening depression. An MRI showed she had a brain lesion, and in June 2022 doctors performed a biopsy.

Inside the lesion, doctors took found a "thread-like structure" and removed it. The structure was a living red parasitic worm, approximately 3.15 inches long and 0.04 inches in diameter.

They determined that it was of an Ophidascaris robertsi, a type of roundworm that is native to Australia and breeds in a large snake, the carpet python, which gets its name from its intricate markings. Pythons excrete the eggs of the worm in their droppings. The eggs are then ingested by small mammals and worms can grow inside.

Roundworms infect hundreds of millions of people worldwide, according to Cleveland Clinic, but researchers in Australia said this is the first report of a species of Ophidascaris worm infecting a human.

The woman has may have been infected with the worm the same way small animals usually are: by accidentally consuming worm eggs.

Carpet pythons were near from a lake near where the woman lived, according to the report. She had no direct contact with the snakes, but often gathered war greens, similar to spinach, around the lake to cook. The article said that she might have inadvertently consumed worm eggs by eating the greens or because her hands or kitchen were contaminated with them.

Scott Gardner , professor of biological sciences. and curator of the Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said people don't need to panic about being infected with Ophidascaris from snakes and they need to have a good hygiene to avoid getting infected with parasites.

"Many parasites that can affect people do so because we are in the wrong place at the wrong time" , said Dr Gardner, who was not involved in the Australian study. said in an interview. "So we're ingesting eggs that aren't supposed to go into us, and if we're immunocompromised, we can get a pretty serious infection."