Doctors at a hospital in south-eastern China’s Fujian Province
recently reported the unusual case of a man whose non-stop coughing had
apparently been caused by a leech attached to his throat.
Last Friday, the unnamed man arrived at the Wuping County Hospital in
the city of Longyan complaining of almost non-stop coughing over the
past two months. He had become increasingly worried about his condition
after coughing up phlegm and blood, so he finally decided to seek
medical attention. Doctors at the hospital’s respiratory department
initially recommended a CT scan, but when that didn’t reveal anything,
they decided to try a more invasive procedure called “bronchoscopy”,
which allowed them to inspect the patient’s air passages with a small
camera. That’s how they found a leech living in his throat.
In fact, the bronchoscopy revealed two leeches, one located about
three centimetres below his glottis (the part of the larynx where the
vocal chords are), and another in his right nostril. Obviously the
patient had no idea how the leeches had found their way into his body,
but doctors believe that he must accidentally have swallowed them while
drinking water from mountain streams.
“When he drank the water, it was likely that they were very small and
undetectable by the naked eye. In the past month or two, the leeches
have sucked the patient’s blood and grown,” Dr Rao Guanyong, director of
the hospital’s respiratory department, told Pear Video.
Doctors administered local anaesthetics to the patient before using
tweezers to remove the live leeches. Everything went smoothly and the
patient is now recovering. The video, which went viral in China, shows
the two leeches wriggling around in a plastic jar.
Last year we wrote about another Chinese man who had a leech hatch and grow in his nose for three months. Earlier this year, we featured the very similar case of a woman who had a leech attached to her throat.
