It sounds like a scene straight out of a nightmare.
One morning you wake up and something is crawling beneath your skin. It wriggles and writhes across your face, seemingly ready to rip out of your skin at any second. (Anyone remember that one scene from the movie Alien?)
But this, my friends, is no nightmare. It is a very real possibility — and a recent reality for one woman infected with Dirofilaria repens, a parasitic worm of the Old World. In her gruesome case described and shown through pictures on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, the woman in Moscow had to have the worm surgically removed from her lip.
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