In a story that seems more like a bizarre nightmare or a horror film plotline than reality, doctors in India recently removed a living, moving cockroach from a man’s intestines.
It all started when a 23-year-old man experienced indigestion and bloating for two days after eating food and decided to get medical care, according to The Indian Express. Routine tests revealed that the bug, a little over 1 inch long, was squirming around in his small intestine.
The patient told doctors that he did not knowingly consume any cockroaches before the pain began.
“Even we were surprised as to how the cockroach managed to stay intact,” said Dr. Shubham Vatsya of Fortis Hospital in the Vasant Kunj neighborhood of New Delhi, who led the team that removed the insect.
Once they found the critter, the Fortis team successfully removed the cockroach during a 10-minute upper gastrointestinal endoscopy procedure. That procedure requires an endoscope with two channels so air and water could move through it.
“We activated the suction button on the scope, effectively sucking the cockroach into the suction channel, leading to its removal from the body and saving the man’s life,” said Dr. Vatsya. He said that if the cockroach remained in the man’s stomach, it could have threatened his life.
Finding living cockroaches inside the human body is a rare enough event that Vatsya’s team was surprised, but it has happened before. Times of India reported in 2017 that doctors found a wriggling cockroach in the nasal cavity between her eyes, near her brain. They eventually removed it, alive, per the report.
According to a 2010 study published in the Gastrointestinal Endoscopy journal, a cockroach was found in the colon of a 51-year-old woman during a screening colonoscopy, though it disintegrated during the procedure. Doctors believed the woman unknowingly consumed it along with green gelatin before the procedure. Study authors did not say if the roach was alive when first spotted.
Last year, Audacy’s “Something Offbeat” podcast covered another story another unwelcome guest in the human body – a 3-inch living worm that was pulled out of a patient’s brain. Dr. Adler R. Dillman, a professor of parasitology and chair of the Department of Nematology at University of California, Riverside, joined the show to explain more about parasites.
While the man in India with the cockroach in his intestine did not knowingly ingest it, some people do in fact eat roaches. For example, David McKenzie wrote about eating fried cockroaches in China for CNN around 10 years ago.
“They leave an aftertaste that has serious staying power,” he said.
Eating other types of insects is not uncommon – according to The Library of Congress, humans have been eating “insects for tens of thousands of year.” However, the University of Michigan noted that there are food safety risks associated with eating bugs.