For more than six months, a 5-year-old girl's right eye had been slowly pushing forward out of its socket. Doctors in Germany eventually traced the bulge to a fluid-filled cyst made by a dog tapeworm. When they looked at the rest of her body, they found the eye was only the beginning: more cysts were growing in her lungs, her liver, both kidneys, and the soft tissue of her chest.
The case, published May 13, 2026, in the journal Infection, comes from physicians at University Children's Hospital Tübingen and the University of Tübingen's Institute of Tropical Medicine, working with colleagues at University Hospital Göttingen and Heidelberg University Hospital. The diagnosis was cystic echinococcosis, also called hydatid disease, caused by the parasite Echinococcus granulosus.
