University of the Unusual (3)

The Guinea Worm (and assorted others)

  When the editor of the journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases went looking for a suitable image for the August 2018 issue, he found the one provided above. It is from a painting done by an Englishman, Ben Taylor, and apparently the inspiration came from within. His story is told in a recent Washington Post article, the title of which reveals the contents. A portion is provided below, followed by another account I remembered from years ago.

“His Health Had Been Failing for Years: Then He Saw Something Crawling in His Eye,” Kristine Phillips, Washington Post, August 9, 2018.

     “He had been experiencing a litany of symptoms his doctors couldn’t explain: lumps that kept appearing and disappearing, blinding pain in his eyes that lasted for a day and came back another, a small muscle in his forehead that he felt “snap.” His white blood cells soared, and itchy rashes covered parts of his body. His joints ached. He was constantly hungry and he had been eating a lot, but he couldn’t gain weight. There was a sinking feeling that his body had become host to unwelcome visitors, but tests showed nothing.

     One morning, he noticed a faint yellowish lump protruding from underneath his left cornea. And then he felt his eye vibrate, as if something was slithering from within. He rushed to a mirror to find that the lump had disappeared, replaced by a thin line that was also protruding. He touched it, and it moved.

     “Oh, I’ve got a worm in my eye!” Taylor recalled thinking.

      At a hospital not far from his home in Dartmoor in southwestern England, a doctor scalped a tiny part of his eye’s outer layer and pulled out the wriggling parasite while Taylor kept his head still. And there it was, an inch-long roundworm called Loa loa. The doctor placed it in a container and Taylor watched it die.

     That year, 2015, Taylor was diagnosed with Loiasis, commonly known as African eye worm, a condition caused by the parasite Loa loa. He contracted it after spending several days in the jungles of Gabon, a Central African country where infections caused by Loa loa had persisted for years.”

Mary Kingsley

     Years ago I discovered Mary Kingsley who was not-at-all a typical Victorian lady. She travelled alone in parts of Africa accompanied only by a few native recruits. She had some amazing encounters which seemed not to have bothered or frightened her at all. I recall her describing 'eye worms' in Travels in West Africa and found this in Chapter XXII, "Disease in West Africa". The tone is typical of most of her writing which I am sure you will enjoy. Note her advice at the end when she says you should get an early start if you are going to have to be extracting some Guinea Worms from the legs of your porters.

     "Filaria.  This is not, what its euphonious name may lead you to suppose, a fern, but it is a worm which gets into the white of the eye and leads there a lively existence, causing distressing itching, throbbing and pricking sensations, not affecting the sight until it happens to set up inflammation.  I have seen the eyes of natives simply swarming with these Filariæ.  A curious thing about the disease is that it usually commences in one eye, and when that becomes over-populated an emigration society sets out for the other eye, travelling thither under the skin of the bridge of the nose, looking while in transit like the bridge of a pair of spectacles.  A similar, but not identical, worm is fairly common on the Ogowé, and is liable to get under the epidermis of any part of the body.  Like the one affecting the eye it is very active in its movements, passing rapidly about under the skin and producing terrible pricking and itching, but very trifling inflammation in those cases which I have seen.  The treatment consists of getting the thing out, and the thing to be careful of is to get it out whole, for if any part of it is left in, suppuration sets in, so even if you are personally convinced you have got it out successfully it is just as well to wash out the wound with carbolic or Condy’s fluid.  The most frequent sufferers from these Filariæ are the natives, but white people do get them.

     Do not confuse this Filaria with the Guinea worm, Filaria medinensis, which runs up to ten and twelve feet in length, and whose habits are different.  It is more sedentary, but it is in the drinking water inside small crustacea (cyclops).  It appears commonly in its human host’s leg, and rapidly grows, curled round and round like a watch-spring, showing raised under the skin.  The native treatment of this pest is very cautiously to open the skin over the head of the worm and secure it between a little cleft bit of bamboo and then gradually wind the rest of the affair out.  Only a small portion can be wound out at a time, as the wound is very liable to inflame, and should the worm break, it is certain to inflame badly, and a terrible wound will result.  You cannot wind it out by the tail because you are then, so to speak, turning its fur the wrong way, and it catches in the wound.

     I should, I may remark, strongly advise any one who likes to start early on a canoe journey to see that no native member of the party has a Filaria medinensis on hand; for winding it up is always reserved for a morning job and as many other jobs are similarly reserved it makes for delay."

Sources: Travels in West Africa (Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons) is available for free over the internet and you are encouraged to have a look. If you prefer more modern adventurous women writers, I recommend Dervla Murphy who also travelled in the same area - Cameroon With Egbert (that's her horse). Her Transylvania and Beyond is even better.

For more in this series - The University of the Unusual - see this one on the Ingestion of Foreign Objects and another on Arrow Storks.