It looked like an ordinary bug bite that had become infected. A 2-year-old girl from upstate New York developed a swollen, red lower eyelid with discharge, and antibiotics did nothing to calm it down. The real culprit was a botfly larva living in the tissue around her eye.
Doctors pushed the larva out with finger pressure. Removing it, combined with systemic therapy, proved effective, according to the report. Her case, described in a paper titled "Ophthalmomyiasis Externa in an Atypical Region," was published online in April in the peer-reviewed journal Case Reports in Ophthalmological Medicine. Its six authors presented it as a lesson for clinicians who would not expect to find fly larvae in a child's eyelid in New York.
