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He had been experiencing a litany of symptoms his doctors couldn’t explain: lumps that kept appearing and disappearing, blinding pain in his eyes that lasted for a day and came back another, a small muscle in his forehead that he felt “snap.” His white blood cells soared, and itchy rashes covered parts of his body. His joints ached. He was constantly hungry and he had been eating a lot, but he couldn’t gain weight. There was a sinking feeling that his body had become host to unwelcome visitors, but tests showed nothing. One morning, he noticed a faint yellowish lump...

By the time Abby Beckley pulled the second wiggly translucent worm from her left eye in August 2016, she knew something weird and unusual was happening.The 26-year-old woman from Brookings who was working as a summer deck hand on the Chirikof, a 58-foot commercial fishing boat plying the waters of Southeast Alaska near Prince of Wales Island, was puzzled by the tiny worms that wiggled and died on her index finger minutes after she gently tugged them from her irritated eye.Beckley and a friend searched the Internet for answers, but found little information that helped. At first, they thought it...

But imagine what you thought may have been an eyelash turns out to actually be a worm wriggling around. This was the reality for a teenager in Mexico. The unnamed 17-year-old boy began to feel increasingly intolerable pain in his right eye. His vision also quickly declined, to the point where he could only see hand motions. After three weeks of dealing with the pain, he decided it was time to seek out a doctor, according to his case published in The New England Journal of Medicine. An eye examination revealed a flatworm, that was 3 millimeters (0.12 inches) long...