Teenage girl Karlie Goff was vacationing with her family in Fiji and ate raw fish dishes there. After that, she began to experience periodic severe pain in the legs and face and this continued for six years. According to doctors, the girl contracted a disease called gnatostomosis. It is caused by parasitic nematode worms.
“I was full of pain, my legs and skin were burning, almost as if acid was poured on me,” Carly Goff said in a recent interview with the Australian channel Seven News, “And I had the feeling that something like a worm was moving inside me and chews my flesh with his teeth. Wherever it goes, wounds arise."
For several years, doctors have been trying to establish the nature of the girl's disease, and only two months ago they found out that the whole point is in parasitic nematodes. After that, the girls were given special pills that were supposed to kill the parasite.
According to Bernard Hudson, chief physician at the Royal North Shore Hospital, where the girl received treatment, this nematode species lives in fish, frogs or untreated water and people usually become infected by eating raw fish.
Gnatostomiasis is caused by larvae or adults of the nematode Gnathostoma spinigerum. Just one larva is enough for the patient's health to deteriorate sharply. This is because the larva does not sit still, but migrates through the body. It can enter any part of the body, lungs, bladder, liver, eyeballs and even the brain.
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With skin lesions, painful and itchy migratory edema appears; limbs and eyelids are particularly affected. Symptoms usually disappear after a week, but they often recur over the years. Damage to the eyeball poses a danger to vision. The defeat of the brain with focal hemorrhages and necrosis often ends in the death of the patient.
A similar disease was found mainly in Thailand, as well as in India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, China, Bangladesh, Israel.
