Paris Apr 14 : A man’s itchy eye turned out to be very serious because he discovered a fly had laid more than a dozen eggs inside.The unnamed man from France, who is reportedly 53-years-old, admitted himself to the University Hospital of Saint-Etienne after having dealt with a nagging irritation in his right eye.There, doctors at the hospital did a quick scan of his right eye and were immediately taken aback by what they found.According to a report that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the eye exam showed ‘more than a dozen mobile, translucent larvae’ around the cornea.The man told the doctors he had been gardening near a horse and sheep farm the same day when he felt something entering his eye.Once the problem was clearly identified, doctors used forceps to physically remove all larvae one-by-one from the man’s eye.The doctors found more larvae inside the conjunctiva, the membrane lining the eyelid, and the white parts of the eye. After successfully extracting the tiny creatures, the doctors identified them as Oestrus ovis (also known as the sheep bot fly) larvae.Following the procedure, the man was diagnosed with external ophthalmomyiasis. “An infestation of the outer structures of the eye by fly larvae,” the doctors from the University Hospital of Saint-Etienne wrote in the report.Larvae cannot be easily removed if they manage to enter the eye. Washing the eye doesn’t really make any difference. According to experts, the only way to remove them is to physically pluck them out of the eye using forceps.Any other method can be risky because the creatures have ‘oral hooks’, which they use to cling to the cornea.In this particular case, the man was lucky that the larvae were only in one of his eyes. A follow-up appointment with the doctors determined he had completely recovered.<\/p>\n