HomeTechnologyWoman sneezes out maggots after fly larvae get trapped in her deviated septum

Woman sneezes out maggots after fly larvae get trapped in her deviated septum

TechnologyMarch 16, 2026
1 min read
Woman sneezes out maggots after fly larvae get trapped in her deviated septum
She made a full recovery, despite the maggots.

A 58-year-old woman in Greece appears to hold the record for growing a parasitic sheep bot fly in her nose the longest, almost creating a snot rocket that could literally fly.

Usually, when the sheep bot fly accidentally nosedives into a human's schnoz, the first-stage larvae they deliver don’t actually develop. In contrast, in its normal target—a sheep's nose—the larvae would move up into the sinuses, feed, grow, and molt into second- and third-stage larvae. From there, the flies (Oestrus ovis) drip from the nose onto the ground, burrow into the soil, pupate, and emerge as adult flies.

For a long time, experts thought that the flies couldn't complete their development in humans beyond the first larval stage. But a few human cases have been reported in recent decades involving the second- and third-stage larvae. The woman's case, reported in the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases by a medical entomologist and colleagues, goes the furthest yet, finding pupa and a puparium—the hard casing of a pupa—in the woman's nose.

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Source: Ars Technica

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