Weird and wonderful things lost, then
found inside the human body
Lancaster (UK), Nov 25: Doctors in Missouri recently made a startling discovery. A 63-year-old patient who went for a routine colon screening was found to have an intact fly in his colon. The doctors had no idea how the fly survived the perilous journey through the patient’s digestive enzymes and stomach acid.
As a professor of anatomy, I come across many such stories of strange things found inside people – foreign bodies, we call them. Here is a roundup of some of them.
A lady in Taiwan recently made the news because a spider and its exoskeleton were found inside her ear. Spiders inside the body are fairly rare, and those with arachnophobia will be pleased to hear that, despite what some say, we don’t eat eight spiders a year in our sleep. However, one unfortunate British postman had an unpleasant result of swallowing a spider, which bit him causing his throat to swell and impair breathing.
While the person giving a home to a spider had little choice in the matter, other people often find themselves ingesting or inhaling things they didn’t mean to. The vast majority of these people are children, particularly when learning to wean.
Sadly, the location of these objects in the respiratory tract is one of the most common causes of death in children under three years of age.
Children tend to place things in their mouths, noses and ears. Things in the mouth and nose typically get inhaled and lodge in the respiratory tract, usually causing choking, which expels the object.
The things children are likely to inhale range from the familiar (toys, beads, magnets) to the unexpected (leeches and needles). And inhaled items vary by region. In western countries, it is peanuts that are inhaled the most, with hotdogs causing most deaths.
In south-east Asia and China it is bones and seeds, with most cases occurring around lunar new year. And in Middle Eastern, African and Mediterranean countries it is typically nuts or seeds. Several studies have also shown that males are far more likely to inhale things than females. Accidentally inhaling things is also an increasing risk as people get older and lose muscle tone. Things sometimes end up going “down the wrong way” – most notably food items, but things such as dentures have been lost too. (PTI)
