The child was 1 and a half years old and lived in a poor neighborhood in a city. One day, the child fell out of bed and got a small wound on the upper left eyelid. Nothing that seemed serious.
Six days later, the eyelid was swollen and itchy, and was oozing a foul-smelling, bloody discharge. Then the parents saw something they hadn’t expected: tiny, yellowish-white structures moving over the wound.
At the hospital, doctors found an ulcer about 3 centimeters wide between the eyebrow and the eyelid, with inflamed, hardened edges. The larvae moved freely through an opening in the lesion, and the swelling was so severe that they couldn’t even examine the eye in detail.
For five days, they removed them one by one with forceps, after immobilizing them with a local anesthetic. In total, they extracted 35. An entomologist identified them: they were flesh fly larvae, a species that usually attacks sheep and rarely affects people.