In a peculiar incident, doctors found at least 10 big ants living inside a girl's ear in Ahmedabad, India. The 12-year-old girl's ear became the home of these ants as about 10 to 15 emerge from her ear each day.
The doctor, who treated the girl, was astonished to witness such a case. Despite having ants inside her ear, Shreya Darji said that she does not feel any pain. In August 2015, Shreya from Banskantha's Deesa town, complained of ear irritation. When Sanjay Darji, the girl's father, had her ear checked, an ENT (Eye Nose Throat) specialist found ants living inside.
The doctor managed to remove about nine to 10 ants from her ear. Two weeks after the treatment, however, the girl still complained of ear irritation. The specialist was shocked to see big ants crept out again. The girl's parents brought her to other specialists and even witch doctors in their town but to no avail. No one of the doctors can determine the cause of the bizarre condition.
"The girl's case is very challenging for me, as I have never seen such a case, nor found it in medical history," Dr. Jawahar Talsania, the ENT specialist who treated her, said. He added that the big ants must be biting her despite the girl claiming she could not feel any pain.
The girl incurred no ear damage despite the presence of these ants and the case is so rare, that the doctor never encountered such condition in his 32 years of service as a doctor. When a laparoscopic camera was used to look inside her ear, there was no queen ant inside that might have laid eggs.
Since her condition is unique and unsolved, she needs to be under constant video surveillance to see possible causes of the illness. According to her father, they have no family medical history of the same condition.
"It is not even the case that some big ants entered her ears by chance. It could not happen every day," Sanjay Darji, the girl's father, said.
In a similar case in Taipei, a doctor extracted at least 25 dead ants in the ear of a 16-year-old girl who loves snacking in bed. The girl claimed to suffer from ear pain for the past several months before she consulted a doctor. She admitted to pick her ears after eating sweets on her bed which lured the ants into her ear canal.
Photo: Charles Lam | Flickr
