14 DAY TRIAL // A dentist at a medical clinic in Brazil had the shock of a lifetime when he realized that what was bothering one of his patients, a young girl named Ana Cardoso, was a pack of fly maggots living inside her gums and eating away at her mouth.
Luckily, the dentist managed to find and remove each and every of the nasty parasites. The girl's gums do not seem to have been permanently damaged by the fly maggots, and the medical expert who handled this case says that she will soon make a full recovery.
The girl felt the maggots move inside her
It is understood that Ana Cardoso's mother, 35-year-old Adriana Cardoso, took her to see a dentist after she started complaining about having an odd, tingling sensation in her gums and feeling something moving around inside her mouth, close to her teeth.
The mother says that, at first, she simply assumed that her daughter was making stuff up. More so given the fact that, when she looked inside her mouth, nothing seemed out of place. Besides, the 10-year-old wasn't experiencing any pain and had no trouble eating.
Eventually, Adriana Cardoso realized that Ana had no reason to lie about there being something seriously wrong with her gums and decided to have her see a dentist. Neither the woman nor her daughter was in any way prepared for what followed.
The dentist was pretty shocked himself
Having examined 10-year-old Ana Cardoso's gums, the dentist told her mother that the young girl was suffering from a rare instance of oral myiasis, which was essentially a fancy way of saying she had fly maggots living inside her mouth.
To remove the parasites, the dentist had to cut open the girl's gums and pull them out one by one with the help of tweezers. During this intervention, a total of 15 maggots were recovered from deep inside Ana's gums. Following the procedure, the girl was administered antibiotics.
“I couldn't believe it when they said she had a disease and then started pulling the maggots out,” the young girl's mother told the press in an interview, as cited by Daily Mail. “I thought I was going to be sick,” 35-year-old Adriana Cardoso added.
Medical experts say that fly maggots that set up camp inside people's gums feed on living or dead tissues, sometimes even on whatever food comes their way. In extremely rare case, they can work their way all the way to the brain and end up killing their host.