Nose Leech . . . No Kidding

In case you did not have enough things to worry about this morning, you may want to add nose leeches to your phobias. Dr. Renzo Arauco-Brown, from the School of Medicine at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima extracted this little beauty out of the nose of a little girl who went swimming in the Amazon. It appears to prefer the inside of your nose as its happy domicile.

The leech has a single row of eight “enormous teeth” (a relative term) and attaches itself to mucous membranes. Because of its teeth, it has been named Tyrannobdella rex or tyrant leech king. It lives in the upper regions of the Amazon and was first discovered in 2007.

I can see it now in my next visit to the Doctor’s office: “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that you do not have the flu. The bad news is that the running nose is due to an Amazonian Nose Leech.”

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