--- title: How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain | TIME description: A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain. canonical: https://time.com/video/q5bHYPQ1/ og:title: How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain og:description: A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain. og:url: https://time.com/video/q5bHYPQ1/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/q5bHYPQ1/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain twitter:description: A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/q5bHYPQ1/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Health # How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain [Watch (HLS stream): How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/q5bHYPQ1.m3u8) (2:51)  _Published 2023-08-29. A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain._ --- Oct 13, 2023 2:14 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Doctors Pull Live Parasite From California Student's Brain](/video/eUaPNiVe/) ### Doctors Pull Live Parasite From California Student's Brain [Quirky Obituary for Woman's Memorial Service](/video/ebgzpKeh/) ### Quirky Obituary for Woman's Memorial Service [Worms in the City: Apartment Composting](/video/nnz1HBxz/) ### Worms in the City: Apartment Composting --- ## Transcript I thought sick, dude around the abnormal area that you can stay on the skin. I thought gosh, that feels funny. You can see anything more abnormal and then I was able to really feel something separate. I took my choices on my team holding. It's not a rat and I thought, gosh, what is that? It's moving, take it out of my hands and we put in a passport thank goodness and it's gone away to the scientist to find out what it was. And I immediately called the infectious disease doctors. And that's what should we do next? It was definitely not. We were expecting. Everyone was shocked and the one that we found was happily moving Quite vigorously outside the brain. How's the patient really well. So we were able to finish. The operation reacts are infectious disease. Doctors, should we do anything else? Look around for nothing else? And I said, No, at that stage. We closed up and she was really pleased to have an answer for many months have been really struggling and he was really courageous of her to come and have further testing off, not having Annika come so very long. But she did really well for knowing what was actually causing all the trouble. And then having now treatment for what was causing the trouble, granted it's never been described before. But the infectious disease doctors in the team. At the Canberra Hospital came up with the appropriate treatment strategy for when she's doing quite well. So am I bringing one screeching like an estimate but in theater, we normally a very controlled and it's certainly not what we expect that we took at time to take stalk, not supposed to went to, the scientists, were able to identify exactly what it was. But it's definitely one of those moments in my life where I'm still a little bit traumatized. Has caused me some degree of stress so it's very unusual to find something. That was so unpredictable beforehand. Patient involved in this had a protracted illness. It was a sort of mystery diagnosis and I was on what we call Ward service. Looking after other patients in the hospital who had infection problems, and I got a call saying, we've got a patient with an infection problem, we've just removed a live with him from this patient's brain and so then the course, there was a flurry of activity in a microbiology laboratory. Just trying to work out what this worm was. And eventually with the help of a very clever csiro sign, this was a new parasite that have never been staying in a human before the human brain, which is I mean quite big but not not huge. And this one was 8, cm long and It was alive and wriggling went out poor, but very skilled neurosurgeon took it out with some forceps. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"How Australian Doctors Found a 3-Inch-Long Live Worm in a Woman’s Brain","description":"A neurosurgeon investigating a woman’s mystery symptoms in an Australian hospital says she plucked a wriggling worm from the patient’s brain.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/q5bHYPQ1/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2023-08-29T15:08:11.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/q5bHYPQ1.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/q5bHYPQ1/","duration":"PT2M51S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/q5bHYPQ1/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```