Woman infested with flesh-eating maggots after trip to Africa
A British woman who returned from a trip to Africa discovered she was harbouring flesh-eating inside her stomach.
Catherine Stewart, 28, from Liverpool noticed a small red spot on her stomach on her return from The Gambia where she had travelled to learn more about the work of the UK charity she was employed by.
She had several red spots on various parts of her body but wasn't initially concerned as they looked like normal insect bites.
"There were just a few red circles that looked like bites [when I was in The Gambia], but when I got home I found more," she said.
When one of the spots developed a yellow head, Stewart decided to open the lesion by squeezing it.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGE
"When I found a yellow one on my stomach I just thought it was just a small infected bite with pus and thought squeezing it might help.
"But as I squeezed I felt something pull back [into the skin]. I immediately thought there was something wrong," she said.
Together, Syewart and her husband Paul squeezed the lesion and removed six live maggots with a pair of tweezers.
'I started screaming and saying "No, no, please tell me it's not a maggot!". Paul then looked at me and said "I think we need to go to hospital",' Stewart recalled.
Doctors at Liverpool Royal University Hospital's School of Tropical Medicine identified the maggots as larvae of the tumbu fly.
They took fifteen minutes to extract a further eight maggots from Stewart's body.
According to the UK's The Daily Mail, the female tumbu fly lays her eggs on damp clothing or towels.
When the maggot infested fabric comes into contact with human skin, the larvae penetrate the skin and burrow into the body's tissue.
Catherine was required to perform daily checks on her body for a full week after the maggots were removed.
Despite her ordeal, she says she is already planning to return to The Gambia.
"The charity work I do is very important and nothing - not even flesh-eating tumbu flies - is going to stop me from doing it," she said.
Catherine Stewart's medical ordeal and those of others feature in a new Discovery Channel documentary, called 'Bugs, Bites and Parasites'.
