GoKawiilA 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.
Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human’s schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don’t actually develop. In contrast, in its normal target—a sheep’s nose— the larvae would move up into the sinuses, feed, grow, and molt into second- and third-stage larvae. From there, the flies (Oestrus ovis) drip from the nose onto the ground, burrow into the soil, pupate, and emerge as adult flies.
For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn’t complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman’s case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium—the hard casing of a pupa—in the woman’s nose.
In the report, the experts note that the woman worked outdoors in an area of a Greek island close to a field with grazing sheep. On a hot and dry September day, she recalled a swarm of flies bombarding her face. About a week later, she had facial pain and then developed a cough over the next two to three weeks. Those were her only symptoms until October 15, when she sneezed and reported that “worms” came out of her nose. They were, in fact, late-stage sheep bot fly larvae.