Question: what is coming out of the boy's noes?

Deuan Jones answered on 15 Jun 2010:

Worms!

It’s one of my favourite parasite pictures I like to show in schools. This is a photo of worms that live in both the intestine and the lungs at different points of their lifecycle. The worms get into your body by you eating something infected with the eggs, they start living in your intestine and then move into your lungs. After they mature for a while in your lungs they move up towards the throat, get swallowed again (!) and then end up back in the intestine where the females lay around 200,000 eggs per day! These eggs pass out when you go the toilet and if they find somewhere to start developing (like a nice bit of warm moist soil) then they get ready to infect someone again – like if you dropped a bit of food onto the ground where some of the eggs were and you just picked it up and eat it.

In the photo, I read that the worms have somehow stayed in the lungs as they’ve got bigger and bigger and that’s how they end up poking out of the nose and mouth – again… urghhh. This boy was having medical help to remove the worms.

If you want to see some movies of these worms actually moving around in your intestine there’s some great ones on youtube.