Should We Panic About “parasitic Eye Worms” or Flies?
My second worst experience of thinking about insects in my eyes was a real encounter as I ran face forward down a path into a swarm of midges. I could not shake the feeling that there was something else in my eye, and after a few hours I finally removed the dead (?) Mosquito from the inside of my eyelid with a cotton swab. The only thing that’s better than this: This morning on Gizmodo reads about face flies .
Recently, a woman in California came face to face with a group of flies on a trail and later discovered that one of them had released worms in her eye. “She recalls brushing the flies off her face and spitting them out of her mouth,” the report says. Over the next month, she and two ophthalmologists discovered four worms in her eyes.
I want to make one thing clear: Face flies and eye worms are two different things , and they work together to produce this particular bodily horror. Sea flies drink the tears of animals. Eyeworms live inside the faces of face flies, in their mouths, and escape into the eye when the seafly feeds. Every now and then, if a person’s face gets into their eyes, a person like you, me, or a California runner may end up with an eye full of tiny worms.
Good news: it’s really rare
There are several species of eye worms, and part of this recent case is newsworthy because this and another case reported last year were caused by a different species ( Thelazia gulosa) than those previously found in human eyes ( Thelazia californiensis ).
These worms mainly affect animals; when they find a human eye, it seems like a mistake. Worms cannot reproduce in your eye, so even if you become infected, they won’t live there forever.
The basic idea for you and me is pretty simple: Get medical attention if your eyes are irritated and you don’t know why, or if you find, you know, worms in your eye. You can see a photo of the Thelazia worm on this CDC page . They are little wee guys, as if you reduced the noodles to a size that made them almost, but not entirely, invisible.
For doctors, the authors of a recent case study recommend sending eyeworms to a parasitology laboratory to be identified not as “yeah, these are eyeworms,” but at the species level. Because scientists are wondering if two cases in two years means that T. gulosa is becoming more common, and if so, we really should be watching (sorry) for that.