Something that 2020 has taught me is to always expect the unexpected. Whilst perusing Twitter the other evening I saw a video shared by Emily Taylor (@snakeymama) which claims to show a woman on an operating table in the Dagestan region in Russia. That all sounds pretty routine right? After all we are currently experience and global pandemic. The madness comes when the the caption states that the woman is undergoing a procedure to remove a 4 feet (120 cm) long snake from inside her abdominal cavity. After watching the video, I had some serious doubts.

First off, the claim was that a snake had ‘crawled’ inside the woman whilst she was asleep. I know this is a matter of semantics but how can snake crawl without any legs? The human stomach is no safe place for a snake, it my be dark and warm but it’s a hostile environment where hydrochloric acid is secreted to help break down food. Why would a snake decide to call this home? It doesn’t make any sense but unfortunately a number of people have fallen for this misinformation so I’m here to help put things straight. To me this all sounds very similar to the old Irish belief that newts would jump down the throat of anyone that slept near water. We know this this isn’t true and I wouldn’t be as lucky anyway!

A warning to the squeamish: you may wish to look away.

Okay. So the video is embedded above. Hopefully you’ve had a chance to watch it a couple of times to evaluate what is going on. Does the animal that is pulled out of the woman’s gastrointestinal tract look like a snake to you? It may resemble a snake in form but there are lots of animals that do, caecilians, worms, eels etc. Keep this in mind. The mystery animal has no discernible head end, doesn’t have any scales and a quick web search shows that it isn’t coloured like any snakes found in the region where the woman is said to have been at the time of the incident. Also for an emergency procedure the medical staff seem pretty relaxed, although they are freaked out a little after revealing the size of the parasite inside the patient.

Some of you may see where I’m going here. The animal removed is not a snake, that’s impossible. Not only would the snake need to make it past the epiglottis and other barriers before entering the stomach but we’ve already mentioned how hostile the environment there would be. If the ‘snake’ did find it’s way in through this past the epiglottis, it would have likely left the patient waking up and coughing due to the obstruction of the airway. Let’s take a step back and ponder the location the parasite without the bias of the information we’ve been fed (forget the whole snake thing for a moment). Some have said it could be a tapeworm which is along the right lines, but these are segmented, flattened and break pretty easily so the act of removing one in this fashion would be risky. I’m also dubious about the size claim, the parasite does not look it’s over a metre to me, part of what we’re seeing is forced perspective making it look much larger than it actually is.

With this in mind, it’s clear in my mind that the woman was suffering from a serious case of ascariasis (for more information check out the CDC website). Ascariasis is caused by a parasitic roundworm Ascaris lumbricoides (or a closely related species) and most cases have no symptoms. It may seem weird to think that this giant nematode worm likely entered the woman’s body through contact with contaminated soil as a microscopic egg and has spent quite some time there maturing to this size. Symptoms range due to the parasite load and the age of the infected individual but it’s clear in this case that abdominal pain was likely the indicator that the woman was sharing her body with an interloper. Parasites are fairly common throughout the world, with up to 1 billion people suffering from ascariasis. Whilst we like to think of parasites as a rare occurrence the data suggests otherwise – not all of them are like the  Klyntar.

A parasite that has evolved to live in the gastrointestinal tract and entered as a small egg, negates the problems we’ve already explored with this being case labelled as a snake. A. lumbricoides can grow to almost 50 cm in size with females growing larger and releasing hundreds of thousands of eggs a day. Where there is one, there are likely more and so I hope this poor woman has been treated accordingly. On another note, A. lumbricoides is extremely resistant to strong chemicals, desiccation, and low temperatures which means it can be a formidable foe. The interesting thing is why a parasite that usually lives in the small intestine was in the stomach. This was either a planned procedure (and so the patient was taking drugs to disrupt the parasite) or she was fasting in order to try to lure the worm out (I’m not sure how effective this would be).

Now without being there, I know this is just speculation. But given my experience with snakes I am pretty certain in my assumptions and research presented here. This highlights the need to both question everything you read on the internet and become more aware with the wonderful world of parasites we potentially share our bodies with.

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