A 28-year-old woman in northern England felt as if "something was moving" in her right eye. Looking in a mirror, she saw a slender, moving structure beneath its surface. At the emergency department, doctors confirmed it: a live, translucent worm about 28 to 30 millimeters long, or just over an inch, migrating under the conjunctiva, the thin membrane covering the white of the eye.
The parasite was Loa loa, the "African eye worm," which is spread by flies in the forests of West and Central Africa. The unusual part was the timing. She had moved to the United Kingdom from Nigeria four years earlier and had not been back since.
