The doctors prodded the fly and confirmed it was dead
Doctors in the United States were left baffled after discovering a fully intact house fly inside a man's intestines during a colonoscopy. The finding, published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology, was made when a 63-year-old man went in for a routine colon screening in Missouri. The colonoscopy was going normal until the doctors reached the transverse colon - the top of the large intestine - and came across a fully intact fly. "This case represents a very rare colonoscopic finding and mystery on how the intact fly found its way to the transverse colon," the doctors from the University of Missouri School of Medicine wrote in the journal.
The 63-year-old patient, whose identity hasn't been revealed, was equally bewildered by the discovery and had no idea how the insect got into his body. He told the doctors that he had only consumed clear liquids before his procedure and, two days before, had eaten pizza and lettuce - but could not recall a fly being on any of the food he ate. The man had no symptoms to suggest he had ingested it, doctors said.
"The fly was not moving on its own or with manipulation with the scope," the team wrote in the journal. Separately, speaking to The Independent, Matthew Bechtold, the chief of Gastroenterology at the University of Missouri, said that he and other doctors prodded the fly and confirmed it was dead.
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Mr Bechtold suggested a couple of ways in which the fly may have made its way to the man's stomach - through consumption or by entering his rectum - yet he and his fellow doctors remain unsure on how the house fly made its way into the transverse colon. Speaking to the outlet, Mr Bechtold said that if the fly had entered through the man's mouth, "you would think that upper digestive enzymes and stomach acid would have degraded the fly. However, the fly was intact, making this hypothesis less likely".
"If from the bottom, an opening must have been created long enough for the fly to fly undetected into the colon and somehow make its way to the middle part of the colon with no light in a very curvy, large intestine. However, this seems unlikely as well," Mr Bechtold added.
It has been known in rare cases for flies and their larvae to infest the human intestines in a condition called intestinal myiasis. But people would have to have eaten food containing fly eggs and larvae, and rarely the eggs can survive stomach acid and hatch, then grow inside the body, according to the National Library of Medicine.