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Strange Buzzing in 9-Year-Old Boy's Ear was Actually a Tick Embedded in His Eardrum:
Three days after a 9-year-old Connecticut boy started to hear a strange buzzing sound in his ear, his parents took him to a doctor at Yale New Haven Children's Hospital.
The boy reported that he had no pain in his ear, no hearing loss, and no ringing or signs of tinnitus. He said he'd been playing outdoors recently on school days.
Then the doctor, Erik Waldman, looked into the boy's ear and saw a true vision of horror—a brown arachnid burrowing into the epidermal layer of the eardrum and feasting on the child's blood.
The hospital captured an image of the tick lodged into the right tympanic membrane, which was published along with a case study on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
So, just pull the little bugger out and all is good, right? Not really. The eardrum is a thin membrane and just pulling out the tick would rupture the eardrum and could leave the child hearing impaired in that ear:
"The eardrum essentially acts as a part of a pretty complex lever mechanism to allow sound to travel from the outer ear into the inner ear and through the middle ear, where there are ossicles—small bones," Kasle told CNN. "You need that drum intact to get good sound."
Kasle was able to remove the tick's feeding structure with a fine hook tool. The boy's eardrum remained intact. Tests a month later revealed the child did not get rashes or fever from the tick.
That does it. From now on, I'm not going outside without a good pair of earplugs!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 30 2019, @05:59PM
If no one else is given access to the footage without an official request from police (and not given out to anyone else, excepting stills or a short clip if you relly need it for a persistent concern in the neighborhood, like someone who might be casing local residences.) But the current 'lets throw all our video in the cloud' is setting a dangerous precedent the average person is too narrowminded to understand the full ramifications of. And as in this case, they didn't need instant footage to find the person, just a neighborhood with at least one camera pointed at the street who could hand over footage when requested. That (hopefully physical) isolation, combined with having to make a physical request to gain access, while slowing down the process during high risk episodes like this, is also the only thing defending us, the American people from pervasive surveillance and an always on police state, which anyone with a lick of sense would do well to be concerned by.
It's amazing to me how America has embraced activities like this kind of surveillance that 20-30 years ago we would have called out as communist, yet today people are calling for more of it, with fewer restrictions on access, use, or oversight of the technology.