- When Tanya Andrews returned from a recent family holiday
in Costa Rica, she had no idea she had brought back a gruesome souvenir.
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- A month later she developed an extremely painful lump
on her head.
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- At first, she thought she had an abscess, but then it
wriggled.
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- At the Hospital for Tropical Diseases they recognised
the problem straight away - it was the living maggot larva of a botfly.
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- While Tanya was enjoying her holiday a mosquito had delivered
a tiny botfly egg onto the surface of her scalp.
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- The egg hatched into a maggot and burrowed deep inside.
Incredibly, this happens to thousands of people every year.
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- As we travel to ever more exotic holiday destinations,
we are at the mercy of a whole range of bizarre parasites just waiting
to colonise us.
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- Strange nosebleeds
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- Soon after travel writer, Broughton Coburn, returned
from Nepal he began to experience regular, inexplicable nosebleeds.
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- They continued for three weeks until an embarrassing
encounter in a teashop made him realise that something was seriously wrong.
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- As he was being served, the waiter took one look at him
and fled in horror.
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- Broughton chased him down the street urging him to tell
him what was wrong. But the boy would only point, wordlessly, at his nose.
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- Broughton returned home and sat in trepidation in front
of a mirror.
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- His patience was rewarded when a brown worm-like creature
emerged from his right nostril and looked around.
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- "I swear it had two beady eyes on it. And it came
out two or three inches, looked around and then retracted. I thought it
was a dream, a vision of some sort."
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- In shock, Broughton rushed off to his doctor who tried
to remove the mysterious creature.
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- But it wasn't going to give up its home easily.
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- "He had this thing pulled out eight or ten inches
and I'm looking at it cross-eyed down the end of my nose, and he's looking
at it, he has a look of absolute horror on his face. And the thing came
off. And there was this leech."
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- Broughton had been invaded by an aquatic leech. It made
its move while he was drinking from a mountain stream.
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- These thirsty bloodsuckers can drink three times their
bodyweight at each feed and inject an anaesthetic so their victim feels
nothing.
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- Welcome visitor
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- But not all parasites are unwanted and uninvited.
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- As part of a University of Salford experiment to develop
a diagnostic test for beef tapeworm, biologist Mike Leahy volunteered to
grow this gruesome parasite inside his own gut.
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- Mike swallowed the immature tapeworm cyst with a glass
of red wine and the worm started to grow at an initial rate of four centimetres
a week.
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- Twelve weeks later he had to call a halt to the unusual
experiment because he was getting married!
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- After a dose of anti-worm pill Mike passed out an intact
tapeworm three metres long.
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- Disgusted? Well according to Dr Val Curtis, an expert
on hygiene, this reaction is a natural survival mechanism.
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- "In the same way that you have an immune system
which helps to protect you from parasites we also have a behavioural system.
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- "When you feel the emotion of disgust it is a driver
of your behaviour to make you keep away from or drop the thing that might
be about to make you sick."
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- And, it seems, we need all the protection we can get.
Every living thing has at least one parasite and many creatures, including
humans, have far more.
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- In fact, parasites make up the majority of species on
Earth.
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- © BBC MMIII
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- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3236294.stm
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