More Mail Bag

Received another email from Piotr Naskrecki, a Ph. D. and director of the invertebrate diversity initiative at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Piotr writes in with his experience:

Hi Jesse,

I thought you might be interested in my experience removing a bot fly larva.
I just extracted one mature larva from my arm using the same venom extractor
(Sawyer's) as described in the Boggild et al. paper. I became infected with
the flies (I still have one more) about 6 weeks ago in Costa Rica. After
talking to my tropical medicine doctor, who had little experience removing
the bots and envisioned a serious surgery, I made the decision to let them
hatch on their own (to my doctor's obvious relief.) Unfortunately, one of
them became very active and extremely painful, and I decided to remove it on
my own. The thought of using the extractor crossed my mind, and, quite
coincidentally, the same day I run across Boggild's paper in PubMed database
(and later on your blog.)

The procedure wasn't as easy and quick as the one they describe, and I had
to apply the suction for nearly 15 minutes, but eventually most of the
larva's body emerged. I was ably to pull the remainder with forceps.
However, midway through the process of sucking the larva out, its body
ruptured; luckily, only the part that was already out of the wound.
Therefore, one should be cautious applying this method as it may kill the
larva while it is still deeply embedded, which may lead to infection. I
removed the entire body of the insect (I am an entomologist and can assess
whether the body of the maggot is complete), but I can imagine a scenario
where the larva becomes ruptured, and the person doing the extraction does
not realize this, and leaves fragments behind.

All in all, however, this method is probably the best I know of, and I will
recommend it to my colleagues, many of whom work in the tropics and
sometimes become infected. I suspect that it will work even better on
younger, smaller larvae.

I hope this information is useful, and thank you for maintaining the blog on
bot fly infections. Keep up the good work!

Cheers,
Piotr

Mail Bag

Here's an email I received from Lauren:

Hi,

Your blog helped me with a diagnosis of my brother Sam even though he is in mexico and I am in california. I learned a lot and he took this great picture when he finally coaxed all three of them out of his arm.



Here's his method:

"I could tell the anti-parasite medication and antibiotic cream suffocation had them dazed, so I just gave a little squeeze when they came up for air, grabbed their heads, then slowly pulled them out. They look whole, huh? The big one´s teeth really hurt. I can´t imagine how big they´d get after 3 more weeks, that is at least size 12 font. I´ve decided to just do topical antibiotics so I can drink at this fiesta."

Thanks for all the links and info!

Bot Fly Removal From Back

The video above shows two very large bot flies being removed from some guy's back. Both bot flies are removed using a tweaser. WARNING: video contains some explicit language.

Short Documentry on Botfly Lifecycle

Botfly Larva in Formaldehyde

Short video clip of a botfly in formaldehyde that came out of a rabbit.

Botfly in Bolivia Statistics

Here's an article(pdf) discussing the statistics of several Israelis who traveled to the Amazon Basin of Bolivia. There were 12 patients studied who traveled between 1994 and 1999. The stats include gender, age, country of exposure, affected area on body, and the method used to remove the botfly.

Penis Myasis Article

This article(pdf) details the extraction of a bot fly from the penis using the applied pressure method. WARNING, the article contains a graphic photo. I take my previous statement back from my last post. The tip of the penis is the worst place to get one.

Once again here's the article: article(pdf)

Previous post on other cures: Cures: Removal and Prevention