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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 30 2019, @12:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-can't-hear-you! dept.

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!


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  • (Score: 2) by Chocolate on Friday May 31 2019, @07:39AM

    by Chocolate (8044) on Friday May 31 2019, @07:39AM (#849686) Journal

    DANGER as in cars etcetera etcetera
    Oops

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    Bit-choco-coin anyone?
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