A mystery that baffled doctors: a fly lives in a man’s intestines

Doctors do not know how the fly entered the man’s intestines

Scientists in Missouri were puzzled and surprised when they found a fly living inside the intestines patient.

And according to The Daily Mail The 63-year-old patient came in for a routine colon cancer screening and doctors discovered the fly in the transverse or upper region of the colon.

The operation was proceeding as usual until doctors reached the transverse colon, the area at the top of the large intestine, where they found a completely intact fly.

Doctors say how the insect got there was a “mystery”, but it may have been due to contaminated lettuce the man had eaten the day before.

The newspaper adds that the evening before his 24-hour fast, he ate pizza and lettuce, but said he did not remember a fly being in his food.

In rare cases, flies lay their eggs in fruits and vegetables, which then escape stomach acid and hatch in the intestines.

“This case represents an extremely rare colonoscopy finding,” doctors wrote about the case, which was published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Flies and their larvae can infect the human intestine in a condition medically called intestinal myiasis. This occurs when someone consumes food containing fly eggs and larvae.

In rare cases, these flies can survive stomach acid and then infect the intestines, growing and possibly mutating into adult flies.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says some infected patients experience no symptoms, but others experience abdominal pain, vomiting and diarrhea.

It was not clear what food the man ate was infested with fly worms, but this has previously been linked to spoiled bananas.

In a case reported in the 1980s, a 12-month-old girl in Washington state was taken to doctors after her mother saw “mobile worms” in her stool. This did not appear in the stool of any other family member.

Investigators determined that the child had been fed ripe bananas that remained suspended in a wire basket in the kitchen that served as a magnet for flies.