Worm ‘from pet dog’ hatched inside woman’s forehead and then crawled into her eye

Doctors removed a four-inch parasitic worm from a woman’s eyelid after it burrowed into her forehead and grew there for a month.

The woman, 26, went to hospital after a wriggling lesion migrated over to her left eye.

Before removing it, medics first took a video of the uninvited guest as it squirmed beneath the thin skin of the upper eyelid, looking a little like a bulging vein.

Doctors then surgically removed a white, 11cm-long roundworm, a scientific report of the case in the New England Journal of Medicine described last week.

Tests identified the worm as Dirofilaria repens, a nematode more commonly found in dogs, foxes, wolves and raccoons. It is transmitted by mosquitoes, who inject a tiny larva at the same time as feeding on blood.

This larva then slowly grows into an adult worm