A British man returning home after a stint of volunteer work in Africa discovered he'd brought back more than he bargained on when a parasitic bug and a hundred of its eggs crawled out of his right foot in his bedroom.
Matthew O'Donnell flew back to England and returned to his East Sussex home in September after working as a volunteer in Tanzania.
As he sat on his bed one morning, the 22-year-old geography graduate of Plymouth University felt a tingling sensation in his right foot.
"I looked down to see a lump, I thought 'What on earth is that?'" O'Donnell says. "A tiny black bug dropped out, followed by 100 little white eggs tumbling after it."
The parasite was identified as a chigoe flea, which can survive in human flesh for as long as a month after burrowing under the skin.
O'Donnell says he had been warned about chigoes -- known in rural Tanzania as jigger fleas -- but was oblivious to the fact he was harboring one in his foot.
Chigoes are the smallest flea known to science and therefore very difficult to spot.
"It seems this insect used me as a free ticket back from Tanzania only to pop out of my foot a month later," O'Donnell says.
He gathered the eggs in some tissue paper then flushed them down the toiled before they could hatch, he says.
He explained that he had a suspicion of what the insect might be because while in Tanzania a friend of his had one of the tiny creatures burrow under one of her toenails.
"This type of tick lives in the sand over there, so if you're walking around in flip-flops it burrows into your skin," he says.
Chigoe fleas lives in warm, dry sand and soil and are often found on beaches and around farms and woodlands. Both female and male fleas will feed on warm-blooded hosts including sheep, cattle, dogs -- and humans -- but only the pregnant female will anchor itself by burrowing into the skin of its host.
"It was pretty creepy," O'Donnell said of his encounter with the parasite. "I've basically acted as a walking incubator for a month without knowing or giving my permission. I wasn't sure whether to laugh at the situation or run into my kitchen hysterically shouting at 3 a.m. to cut my foot off with a carving knife."
Doctors who examined his foot afterward found a small crater near his little toe, evidence of where the flea emerged with its eggs, but said otherwise he is completely in the clear.
