You’ve probably heard the horror story about a person that one day discovers something
that looks like a pimple on their face.
It’s itchy and annoying, and over time it gets bigger.
Then one day they decide enough is enough and in front of the bathroom mirror they go
at it with their fingers with the intention of popping the beast.
To their utter disgust, there’s no pus or blood, instead what comes out is a stream
of tiny insects.
Something creepy crawly laid its eggs inside their face.
It’s a tale that has been passed down through generations, but just how true is it?
Can bugs really lay eggs in someone’s face?
This legend usually involves a spider and today we’ll talk about critters in many
forms, but we’ll first look at egg-laying face spiders.
While people might have claimed to have been the host of an egg-laying spider it’s just
not true.
There aren’t any cases in the medical literature that detail this happening.
The human body is just not a good place for a spider to lay eggs, so even if you had an
open wound that wouldn’t be the spot Ms. Spider chooses to dump her children-to-be.
Moreover, spiders put their eggs in a tiny sac they’ve made, and the babies can get
out of that.
Trying to bury eggs under human skin would be pretty much spider infanticide, meaning
she’d be killing her little eight-legged bundles of joy.
If they hatched they’d die.
The female spider will also stick around with those eggs so she can check on them, so that
would mean the girl would have to hang about on a human body.
She’d be with you at school, in the office, and doing her rounds while you’re sleeping.
It just doesn’t happen.
Spiders don’t really even like being near humans, and they try to avoid us like the
plague for the most part.
So, choosing a human as an egg-laying ground makes no sense at all.
These guys are not parasitic, meaning they don’t need to live off another animal.
We hope that’s cleared things up for you.
You can now live your life with the knowledge that at no point will you pick open a boil-like
thing on your body and tiny spiders will burst out of it, running ecstatically over you as
they experience their first taste of freedom.
We should add that it is plausible that a spider could find an open orifice in a human
and lay something there, because hey, a dark hole is a dark hole, but it’s just not ideal
for a spider to do that.
Why would she abandon her eggs there?
It’s just not a safe place given the human proclivity to pick itchy orifices.
She’d much rather lay her eggs in some dark corner or a dark cellar where things tend
to be quiet.
We did find one case in which a Chinese woman had an itchy ear for a few days, and if you
believe the British tabloid press, the source of the itchiness was a spider that had made
the woman’s ear its home for five days.
Why?
Maybe it was lost, or maybe it wanted some adventure, or maybe it was lazy.
We don’t know.
Anyway, no eggs were laid during its holiday in the hearing organ.
This is all good news so far, but things are going to get worse.
We’ve allayed your fears about baby spider eruptions, and now we’ll provide you with
some more frightening information.
There is a video on YouTube with the terrifying title of, “Removing botfly larvae from under
human skin.”
Over 1.6 million people have witnessed the small operation and no doubt will agree the
entire thing is quite gross.
So, what’s a botfly and how are they getting under our skin?
You might have heard them called warble flies, or heel flies, or gadflies, but what’s important
to know is that some kinds of female botfly have this trick of basically getting a free
ride on the back of a mosquito.
She then attaches her eggs to the mozzie and when you have your blood sucked those eggs
get in the hole.
You have become the host for the squatters.
Humans are not usually the victim, but it happens.
Animals aren’t as good at protecting themselves as humans, but some humans just get unlucky.
There’s a thing called, “Myiasis”, which means when a parasitic insect has used an
animal as a host and an infestation of maggots has happened.
Sometimes the myiatic flies might use an open wound to do their egg-laying, but sometimes
they can break through unbroken skin.
The eggs might end up on food and then make its way into a person’s stomach.
They have also been known to enter the body through the eyes, the ears and the nose.
Let’s now have a look at some real-life cases.
The National Institutes of Health writes that human infestation is rare, but it does happen.
It sounds a bit like the spiders in the face story we talked about at the start of the
show, in that a person will complain of a painful bump or sore on the skin.
That might get misdiagnosed as a boil, or a cyst or an insect bite, when it’s actually
larvae doing its business in its warm human host.
NIH gives the example of a 25-year man who went to see a doctor complaining of a painful
lump on his head.
The doctor said it was a cyst and then it was drained, but the lump came back.
They drained it again, and a few weeks later he returned to see the doctor again.
There was a lump again so they decided to look deeper inside.
This is what NUH said happened next, “Upon subcutaneous dissection, a black, 1.4 cm long
foreign body was encountered.
It appeared to be a cocoon or insect larva.”
It seems the guy had become the host after his three-week-long honeymoon in Costa Rica.
In that case it was thought a botfly had likely done his hijacking routine on a mosquito and
that’s how the man became the victim.
NIH added some more information about how the larvae survive in the human.
It said: “While in the skin, the larvae breathe through
a small opening in the skin, which they also use to dispose of their serosanguinous feces.
They develop concentric rows of small black spicules that assist in anchoring them in
place, and can grow up to 3 cm in length.”
At least they get rid of their feces, so we can applaud them for having good manners while
they stay at the human hotel.
Serosanguinous by the way relates to liquid drainage.
The good news is this doesn’t happen often in the United States, but the bad news is
when it does it can be very painful and also pretty gross.
Even worse news is that NIH said fatalities have been reported when the larvae got into
the soft part of a newborn’s skull, something called, “fontanelles.”
That won’t affect you because you’ve grown up.
If you think you have something living in your skin you should of course see a doctor,
but NIH said there are simple methods to make larvae move out of the house they are living
in.
You can basically suffocate them by putting tape on the wound, or covering it with petroleum
jelly or even pork fat.
They have no breathing hole and so come out and migrate.
We found another story about an American taxonomist, you know, someone who groups different organisms,
and he returned home with a very painful swelling on his head.
As this guy was a scientist he had a suspicion regarding what was going on, and what was
causing the pain.
He told Wired that the reason for the intense pain was because those things rotate under
the skin.
He told Wired, “So at that point the typical reaction is that you know you have a maggot
in your body, and you must get it out.”
That same article mentioned a young girl who started hearing crunching sounds when she
was not eating.
That sound was larvae feeding on her from inside her ear.
When humans get infested there is a wound, and the larvae feed on that wound.
But enough of botflies, what else can get into us?
The scabies mite could get into humans.
If they do, they will likely be too small to see.
But you’ll get an itch and some redness.
They might be passed from human to human, and dogs might give them to you, too.
When they get into human flesh through a small burrow, the female might then lay some eggs
which will take three to five days to hatch into larvae.
The larvae then might move around on the skin, but they are tiny.
When these things start burrowing it can cause an allergic reaction, and that’s why there
is some itching going on.
It’s just an immune system response to something foreign invading you.
If you keep scratching that itch you might get a secondary infection, and so you should
try not to do that.
Getting rid of scabies is a story in itself, so we suggest you look that up if you want
to know.
Then there’s the screwworm fly, which sounds a bit scarier than the scabies mite.
These things look for open wounds where they can lay their eggs, and while animals are
usually their host it’s said humans are fair game.
Apparently there was a recent screwworm outbreak in Florida, but the media said it was only
cattle and pets that got hit.
Once mother screwworm finds an open wound she will lay her eggs there.
The maggots that hatch can then start eating the flesh.
The good news is that one scientist said humans are pretty much their last choice.
NIH wrote about some cases that happened in South America, saying one reason the people
became the hosts was because they didn’t take care of their wounds.
They were very poor, or sick, or mentally ill.
What about the dreaded head lice, things that pick on millions of American kids every year?
Well, as annoying as they might be, they aren’t anywhere near as gross or dangerous as the
things we have talked about.
They might just cause some itching and embarrassment to a kid whose peers are not very nice.
But anyone can get these things and an infestation has nothing to do with personal hygiene.
Head lice endorse equal opportunities when it comes to finding a host.
They don’t jump on people, but are spread from head to head or from objects that have
been on a head such as a hat or a comb.
The spreading through objects isn’t very common.
They apparently love thick and clean hair.
The females do lay eggs in the hair, which are commonly referred to as nits.
They lay them close to the scalp, so we can’t say anything goes on inside the host.
Much worse is the tumbu fly, and this should really only be an annoyance to people who
live in tropical regions of Africa.
These things might lay their eggs on damp clothes and find their way into humans from
there.
We found a story of a British woman who’d been working in Africa and when she got home
she started to get a painful itch.
She told the British media, “When I found a yellow one on my stomach I just thought
it was just a small infected bite with pus and thought squeezing it might help.”
But then when she squeezed she felt something pull back.
There was something living inside of her.
She told her husband to get some tweezers and together they did a bit of ad hoc surgery.
The outcome was what she described as a “large maggot” being pulled out of her.
She took a trip to the hospital and was told that the maggots were trying to eat their
way out of her.
But all was well, because within no time at all the doctor got eight of them out.
The woman and her husband had already got six of them so that meant she’d been host
to 14 maggots in total.
One doctor that was interviewed said the extraction process can be hard and sometimes goes wrong
when the maggot spits, so he said a good thing to do is suffocate the things, just like the
NIH said.
We’ll finish this with something called Ekbom syndrome, which is also called delusional
parasitosis.
This is when a person is convinced they are infested with bugs or parasites, but it’s
actually all in their head.
We’ve actually felt our skin crawl making this show, so we can understand it happens.
People might scratch themselves like crazy or keep taking hot showers, and even if they
get a medical diagnosis telling them they are delusional, they will often not believe
it.
You could say this is the worst thing we have talked about today because there is no easy
cure.
You might argue that pulling a few maggots out of your head is not anywhere near as bad
as having an infestation that no one can find and no one but you believes in.
Have you or anyone you know ever been host to anything like this?
Tell us the story in the comments?
Now go watch “Crazy Things A Doctor Removed From Inside Person's Body.”
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.