Welcome to How Stuff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum, a researcher and writer. Here's how Stuff Works. Every week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture, except when I don't. This week, we've got just one story for you, but it's a longer one, so don't worry. If you're driving, you've still got about the same amount of time before you have to fiddle with your phone again. This one is from staff writer and editor Joe McCormick, who's also the co host of a compatriot podcast of ours, Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Joe wanted to know how and what happens when a human swallows a leech, which is a thing that happens more often than you'd like to thank, which, to be fair, is more often than never. So come along as Joe explores the historical and modern cases of leech endo parasitism. Here's what happens when you swallow a leech. In surgeon Lieutenant T. A. Granger of the British Indian Army wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal to report a stomach turning case of parasite infestation he encountered at his colonial outpost. While working at a fort in the Northwest Provinces of India, Granger received a letter from an officer asking for his help with an unusual medical complaint. According to the note, a local man had a leech attached to the inside of his throat. At first, Granger assumed it couldn't be true. Nevertheless, he agreed to see the patient. The person he encountered was, by Granger's account, an elderly pashtooned man with a gray beard. When Granger came within sight, the old man immediately spat out a heavy mouthful of thick, blackened blood, presumably to demonstrate that his complaint was real. With the help of interpreters, Granger questioned the man to learn about his condition. According to his story, eleven days previous, the old man had been drinking out of a rainwater tank when he suddenly felt something catch in his throat. When he tried to cough it up, he couldn't. Then the thing caught in his throat began to move. He had difficulty swallowing and felt like he was going to choke on the writhing obstruction it caused him to vomit and to spit up blood repeatedly. When Granger first looked inside the old man's throat, he was able to remove a clot of blood, but couldn't see any parasite. If it was there, it had to be deeper. So the surgeon Lieutenant produced a pair of polypus forceps, essentially very long tweezers with scissor handles, and reached into the hidden depths of the man's lower farynx, near the esophagus they are. He detected the presence of an object, and through the metal of his instrument, Granger could feel it moving. With the tips of the four steps, he grabbed hold of the squirming object and with considerable force, pulled it out. Indeed, it was a leech between two point five and three inches or about six and a half to seven and a half centimeters long, with a body shaped like the three oh three inch ammunition the British infantry used in their lee Metford rifles. A slimy, writhing rifle cartridge engorged with human blood had been living in this man's throat for eleven days. Granger's letter to the b MJ doesn't go on to report what happened to the old man, But after an experience like this, one would at least hope the worst moment in the man's life was behind him. When it comes to leeches in the throat, Granger's report is not an isolated incident. Granger himself heard stories of other cases like this in neighboring towns, and this phenomenon is by no means limited to nineteenth century India. Getting a leech attached to the inside of a body cavity is common enough that there are special medicalized terminologies for it, such as leech indo parasitism or internal hierodoniasis. These are phrases most of us would probably rather not have in our vocabulary, but even today, in the twenty first century, people still show up at hospitals around the world with leeches stuck inside their throats. Strictly speaking, the leeches a worm phylum Analyta subclass heroudonea, from which we get the word hierudoniasis, which refers to the condition of being parasitized by a leech. Leeches have segmented bodies imagine rings like an earthworm, and suckers at both ends. One large sucker at the rear of the body used crawling and leverage, and a smaller sucker at the front containing the jaws and the mouth. Not all leeches are blood drinkers. Some scavenge for detritus, some are predatory hunters. But the leech we know best is that vampiric parasite that clamps onto the larger host and steadily drains all the blood it can, often until the leech's body is swollen to around ten times its original size. In the wild, leeches drink from all manner of hosts, mammals, fish, and amphibians. When a leech bites, it makes a y shaped incision in the skin with three curved jaws covered in serrated teeth like tiny circular saws, and then extracts blood with a muscular sucking action. The saliva of the leech is known to contain a cocktail of chemicals to ease the process, including heroudin, a polypeptide that prevents blood from clotting. Leeches are classically known as external parasites, drawing their liquid diet through the outer skin of the host, but given the ratunity, they will feed from internal surfaces as well, such as the nave of pharynx, larynx, vagina, bladder, and anus. Humans have an unusual relationship with leeches that's perhaps unique among all the world's parasites. The use of leeches is pervasive throughout the history of medicine, even giving the European medical leech harudo medicine alis its modern name. In some historical periods, they were so commonly used as instruments of blood letting that collecting wild leeches was a solid money making operation. Rural leech gatherers would wage bare legged through the scum of stagnant ponds, hoping when they emerged on the other side to see patterns of glistening green black anelids sucking from their ankles and calves. In his eighteen oh seven poem Resolution and Independence, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth writes about his encounter with this brand of leech harvester quote. He told that to these waters he had come to gather leeches, being old and poor, employment hazardous and wearisome, and he had many hardships to endure. From pond to pond, he roamed from more to more, housing with God's good help by choice or chance, And in this way he gained an honest maintenance. Assuming you find the idea of being sucked by a leech somewhat disgusting, and assuming you find the idea of being sucked by a leech on the inside of your body even more disgusting, you might find it odd that the human taste for therapeutic parasitism doesn't stop at the outer skin. During the leech craze, leaching enthusiasts open many of their bodily orifices and internal cavities to the prized worms with the help of some ingenious medical technology. In a two thousand eleven article on the technological history of leeching, Robert G. W. Kirk and Neil Pemberton right that quote. The opening of the interior of the body often required the physical alteration of the leech, for example, the attachment of thread to prevent the loss of the leech within, or the supplementation of the leech with mechanical tools to enable the passage of the creature into locations such as the anus, where it was now recommended as a means to treat problematic prostates. There are even a few limited ways in which leeches have proven useful, though perhaps still controversial, in the science based medicine of recent decades, such as to ensure veins are working properly and aren't overfilled or distending after microsurgery. Here and there, you can still encounter reports in medical journals of rare cases of accidental internal hyerdoniasis, including leeches in the throat. In two thousand two, a group of doctors reported in the journal Pediatric Pulmonology the case of a six year old boy in Syria who was brought to the emergency room because he couldn't breathe. His mother reported that he had been coughing up blood and that a month ago a village doctor had diagnosed the boy with asthma and prescribed court steroids and broncho dilators. This turned out to be a misdiagnosis. The doctors were able to remove a seven centimeter or nearly three inch leach from the boy's airway through surgery, and subsequently discovered that the child had been drinking from a leech infested stream in rural northern Syria. After the leech was removed, the boy's symptoms disappeared. In two thousand nine, another group reported in the European Journal of Pediatrics the case of an eleven year old boy in central Iran who presented it a rural healthcare center with blood in his mouth and a sore throat that had lasted for two weeks. The boy had been given antibiotics for his sore throat and the problem did not respond. Inspection of his mouth revealed a black circular blob about two centimeters by three centimeters or about point eight by one point two inches, stuck to the back of his throat, with blood oozing all around it. Doctors applied litacaine spray, a topical pain killer, and then pull the leech out with blunt forceps. Questioning revealed the boy had been swimming in a lake near his village. After the leech was removed, blood continued to ooze out of the wound for about an hour, but otherwise the boy was all right. In a doctor named Demeckey McConnon published an article in the Ethiopian Journal of Health Science relaying the case of a seven year old boy in Ethiopia who presented with blood stained saliva and shortness of breath at his home. Someone had tried to treat him with a traditional medicine made of tobacco leaves and flax seed to no effect. In the report, McConnon indicates that the boy had contact with an unprotected source of spring water that was also used for watering animals. Luring scopy showed some kind of foreign body at the top of the trachea. The child was put under general anesthesia and the leech was removed with forceps. After the extraction, the boy seemed to have a full recovery. Laryngeal and pharyngeal leech infestations are rare these days, especially in developed countries with access to clean water, but it can still happen. Possible symptoms of a leech in the throat are difficulty swallowing, sore throat, vomiting blood, coughing up blood, a sense of having a foreign body in the throat melna meaning dark sticky feces indicating the swallowing of blood, a feeling of suffocation or shortness of breath, and harsh or raspy breathing. If you think you've got a leech in your throat right now, don't panic. Just see a doctor as soon as you can, as you may have gathered from the cases we just mentioned, pharyngeal or even laryngeal harrod niasis is not necessarily a death sentence, though it can be dangerous if the parasite obstructs any part of the airway. If the doctor knows what to look for and has a pair of blunt forceteps on hand, chances are good that you'll be all right. But of course the best case scenario is to avoid the problem entirely, So don't drink dirty water and don't swim in the water where the leeches slim. That's our show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Further thanks to our audio producer Dylan Fagin and our editorial liaison Alison Laddermilk. Subscribe to now Now for more of the lated science news and sends links to anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus a tattoo artist whose work you dig. As always, you can send us an email at now podcast at how stuff works dot com, and for lots more stories like these, head on over to our home planet now dot how stuff works dot com.

Welcome to How Stuff Works. Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum, a researcher and writer. Here's how Stuff Works. Every week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture, except when I don't. This week, we've got just one story for you, but it's a longer one, so don't worry. If you're driving, you've still got about the same amount of time before you have to fiddle with your phone again. This one is from staff writer and editor Joe McCormick, who's also the co host of a compatriot podcast of ours, Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Joe wanted to know how and what happens when a human swallows a leech, which is a thing that happens more often than you'd like to thank, which, to be fair, is more often than never. So come along as Joe explores the historical and modern cases of leech endo parasitism. Here's what happens when you swallow a leech. In surgeon Lieutenant T. A. Granger of the British Indian Army wrote a letter to the British Medical Journal to report a stomach turning case of parasite infestation he encountered at his colonial outpost. While working at a fort in the Northwest Provinces of India, Granger received a letter from an officer asking for his help with an unusual medical complaint. According to the note, a local man had a leech attached to the inside of his throat. At first, Granger assumed it couldn't be true. Nevertheless, he agreed to see the patient. The person he encountered was, by Granger's account, an elderly pashtooned man with a gray beard. When Granger came within sight, the old man immediately spat out a heavy mouthful of thick, blackened blood, presumably to demonstrate that his complaint was real. With the help of interpreters, Granger questioned the man to learn about his condition. According to his story, eleven days previous, the old man had been drinking out of a rainwater tank when he suddenly felt something catch in his throat. When he tried to cough it up, he couldn't. Then the thing caught in his throat began to move. He had difficulty swallowing and felt like he was going to choke on the writhing obstruction it caused him to vomit and to spit up blood repeatedly. When Granger first looked inside the old man's throat, he was able to remove a clot of blood, but couldn't see any parasite. If it was there, it had to be deeper. So the surgeon Lieutenant produced a pair of polypus forceps, essentially very long tweezers with scissor handles, and reached into the hidden depths of the man's lower farynx, near the esophagus they are. He detected the presence of an object, and through the metal of his instrument, Granger could feel it moving. With the tips of the four steps, he grabbed hold of the squirming object and with considerable force, pulled it out. Indeed, it was a leech between two point five and three inches or about six and a half to seven and a half centimeters long, with a body shaped like the three oh three inch ammunition the British infantry used in their lee Metford rifles. A slimy, writhing rifle cartridge engorged with human blood had been living in this man's throat for eleven days. Granger's letter to the b MJ doesn't go on to report what happened to the old man, But after an experience like this, one would at least hope the worst moment in the man's life was behind him. When it comes to leeches in the throat, Granger's report is not an isolated incident. Granger himself heard stories of other cases like this in neighboring towns, and this phenomenon is by no means limited to nineteenth century India. Getting a leech attached to the inside of a body cavity is common enough that there are special medicalized terminologies for it, such as leech indo parasitism or internal hierodoniasis. These are phrases most of us would probably rather not have in our vocabulary, but even today, in the twenty first century, people still show up at hospitals around the world with leeches stuck inside their throats. Strictly speaking, the leeches a worm phylum Analyta subclass heroudonea, from which we get the word hierudoniasis, which refers to the condition of being parasitized by a leech. Leeches have segmented bodies imagine rings like an earthworm, and suckers at both ends. One large sucker at the rear of the body used crawling and leverage, and a smaller sucker at the front containing the jaws and the mouth. Not all leeches are blood drinkers. Some scavenge for detritus, some are predatory hunters. But the leech we know best is that vampiric parasite that clamps onto the larger host and steadily drains all the blood it can, often until the leech's body is swollen to around ten times its original size. In the wild, leeches drink from all manner of hosts, mammals, fish, and amphibians. When a leech bites, it makes a y shaped incision in the skin with three curved jaws covered in serrated teeth like tiny circular saws, and then extracts blood with a muscular sucking action. The saliva of the leech is known to contain a cocktail of chemicals to ease the process, including heroudin, a polypeptide that prevents blood from clotting. Leeches are classically known as external parasites, drawing their liquid diet through the outer skin of the host, but given the ratunity, they will feed from internal surfaces as well, such as the nave of pharynx, larynx, vagina, bladder, and anus. Humans have an unusual relationship with leeches that's perhaps unique among all the world's parasites. The use of leeches is pervasive throughout the history of medicine, even giving the European medical leech harudo medicine alis its modern name. In some historical periods, they were so commonly used as instruments of blood letting that collecting wild leeches was a solid money making operation. Rural leech gatherers would wage bare legged through the scum of stagnant ponds, hoping when they emerged on the other side to see patterns of glistening green black anelids sucking from their ankles and calves. In his eighteen oh seven poem Resolution and Independence, the English romantic poet William Wordsworth writes about his encounter with this brand of leech harvester quote. He told that to these waters he had come to gather leeches, being old and poor, employment hazardous and wearisome, and he had many hardships to endure. From pond to pond, he roamed from more to more, housing with God's good help by choice or chance, And in this way he gained an honest maintenance. Assuming you find the idea of being sucked by a leech somewhat disgusting, and assuming you find the idea of being sucked by a leech on the inside of your body even more disgusting, you might find it odd that the human taste for therapeutic parasitism doesn't stop at the outer skin. During the leech craze, leaching enthusiasts open many of their bodily orifices and internal cavities to the prized worms with the help of some ingenious medical technology. In a two thousand eleven article on the technological history of leeching, Robert G. W. Kirk and Neil Pemberton right that quote. The opening of the interior of the body often required the physical alteration of the leech, for example, the attachment of thread to prevent the loss of the leech within, or the supplementation of the leech with mechanical tools to enable the passage of the creature into locations such as the anus, where it was now recommended as a means to treat problematic prostates. There are even a few limited ways in which leeches have proven useful, though perhaps still controversial, in the science based medicine of recent decades, such as to ensure veins are working properly and aren't overfilled or distending after microsurgery. Here and there, you can still encounter reports in medical journals of rare cases of accidental internal hyerdoniasis, including leeches in the throat. In two thousand two, a group of doctors reported in the journal Pediatric Pulmonology the case of a six year old boy in Syria who was brought to the emergency room because he couldn't breathe. His mother reported that he had been coughing up blood and that a month ago a village doctor had diagnosed the boy with asthma and prescribed court steroids and broncho dilators. This turned out to be a misdiagnosis. The doctors were able to remove a seven centimeter or nearly three inch leach from the boy's airway through surgery, and subsequently discovered that the child had been drinking from a leech infested stream in rural northern Syria. After the leech was removed, the boy's symptoms disappeared. In two thousand nine, another group reported in the European Journal of Pediatrics the case of an eleven year old boy in central Iran who presented it a rural healthcare center with blood in his mouth and a sore throat that had lasted for two weeks. The boy had been given antibiotics for his sore throat and the problem did not respond. Inspection of his mouth revealed a black circular blob about two centimeters by three centimeters or about point eight by one point two inches, stuck to the back of his throat, with blood oozing all around it. Doctors applied litacaine spray, a topical pain killer, and then pull the leech out with blunt forceps. Questioning revealed the boy had been swimming in a lake near his village. After the leech was removed, blood continued to ooze out of the wound for about an hour, but otherwise the boy was all right. In a doctor named Demeckey McConnon published an article in the Ethiopian Journal of Health Science relaying the case of a seven year old boy in Ethiopia who presented with blood stained saliva and shortness of breath at his home. Someone had tried to treat him with a traditional medicine made of tobacco leaves and flax seed to no effect. In the report, McConnon indicates that the boy had contact with an unprotected source of spring water that was also used for watering animals. Luring scopy showed some kind of foreign body at the top of the trachea. The child was put under general anesthesia and the leech was removed with forceps. After the extraction, the boy seemed to have a full recovery. Laryngeal and pharyngeal leech infestations are rare these days, especially in developed countries with access to clean water, but it can still happen. Possible symptoms of a leech in the throat are difficulty swallowing, sore throat, vomiting blood, coughing up blood, a sense of having a foreign body in the throat melna meaning dark sticky feces indicating the swallowing of blood, a feeling of suffocation or shortness of breath, and harsh or raspy breathing. If you think you've got a leech in your throat right now, don't panic. Just see a doctor as soon as you can, as you may have gathered from the cases we just mentioned, pharyngeal or even laryngeal harrod niasis is not necessarily a death sentence, though it can be dangerous if the parasite obstructs any part of the airway. If the doctor knows what to look for and has a pair of blunt forceteps on hand, chances are good that you'll be all right. But of course the best case scenario is to avoid the problem entirely, So don't drink dirty water and don't swim in the water where the leeches slim. That's our show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in. Further thanks to our audio producer Dylan Fagin and our editorial liaison Alison Laddermilk. Subscribe to now Now for more of the lated science news and sends links to anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus a tattoo artist whose work you dig. As always, you can send us an email at now podcast at how stuff works dot com, and for lots more stories like these, head on over to our home planet now dot how stuff works dot com.