Small maggots found in the ear

Woman in Taiwan with maggots in the ear

02/22/2014

A 48-year-old Taiwanese woman complained during a routine checkup on chronic earache and ear pressure. The medical diagnosis should sound disgusting to most people: The patient had fruit fly larvae in the ear canal.

Fruit fly larvae behind the hearing aid
A 48-year-old woman from Taiwan complained of chronic ear pain in a routine check-up at a hospital in the capital, Taipei, about a year ago. The diagnosis made by the physician, Shi Cheng-Pien, may sound disgusting to most people: fruit fly larvae had spread behind the patient's hearing aid. Dr. Shi explained in a video how they might have got into the ear canal: „If we leave fruit on our dining table, it may be that the larvae develop there so far that they crawl out of the fruit and look for new food and a new habitat. That's why they slipped into the hearing aid and when the woman put it back in her ear, she also took the larvae with her.“

Hearing aid not cleaned regularly
The patient did not clean her hearing aid regularly according to the doctor. The doctors used a mild anesthetic for treatment. „If you want to eliminate living material, you can use an oily substance, it contains a light anesthetic. This eliminates the pain first, but it also kills the living material“, Sun Shi in the film report. To remove the larvae, a single treatment was enough. Thereafter, the patient's ear healed in just a few weeks.

Self-cleaning of the ears
Not only hearing aids require regular cleaning, this can sometimes make sense for the ears themselves. The human body is usually able to cleanse the ears themselves. Tools such as cotton swabs, drops or sprays are therefore unnecessary. But there are also people in whom the self-cleaning does not work properly. This is the case, for example, with particularly crooked ear canals or swimmers and sometimes older people. If the earwax in the ear canal then becomes uncomfortable, the person should go to the Otolaryngologist (ENT) for a professional cleaning. (Ad)