5-inch live worm removed from man’s eye in India

It sounds like something out of a horror flick, but doctors in India say they found and removed a 5-inch live worm from a man's eye.

PK Krishnamurthy, 75, came to Fortis Hospital in Mumbai complaining of "itching and irritation" in his right eye for the past two weeks, BBC News reported.

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Eye expert  Dr V. Seetharaman told Agence France-Press he was shocked by what he found — a writing, threadlike parasite swimming around in the man's eye.

"It was wriggling there under the conjunctiva," he told AFP. "It was the first time in my career of 30 years that I had seen such a case."

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Doctors rushed Krishnamurthy to surgery, fearing serious damage, but were able to safely removed the creature as his horrified wife, Saraswati, watched, the Mumbai Mirror reported.

"It just kept moving and jumping," she told the Mirror. "It was scary for a bit."

The worm has been sent to the hospital's microbiologists for testing, AFP reported.

The case was "extremely unusual" and Krishnamurthy was lucky the worm did not end up in his brain, Dr. S Narayani, the hospital's medical director, told the BBC.

It's not clear how the worm got there, but such parasites often enter a person's body through their bloodstream, Narayani told the BBC.