Darn quickbeam, you beat me to it
I couldn't reach the Urban Legends site from here today for some reason and was having to search through the google cache pages to find it
If anyone else is having similar problems the cache is at:
google cache of Urban Legend
And here is the text:
Bizarre as it may seem, the preceding photos are authentic, though the same cannot be said of the accompanying narrative, which is a fabrication.
We don't know who assembled the collage, but after a painstaking search we did find the original source of the images: an article entitled "Anterior Orbital Myiasis Caused by Human Botfly," published in the July 2000 number of the Archives of Ophthalmology, a journal of the American Medical Association (see Index of Figures for individual photos).
"Myiasis" is the medical term for a maggot (fly larva) infestation of a living body. In this case, the patient was a 5-year-old boy treated by U.S. Air Force surgeons in a rural area of the Republic of Honduras. "The respiratory pore of a late-stage larva of the human botfly (Dermatobia hominis) was located in the anterior orbit," says the article abstract. "The larva was gently removed under general anesthesia through a small incision in the conjunctiva." The patient was apparently none the worse for wear.
It would appear the text of this article was not consulted when the email tale was composed. Neither "bad dust" nor excessive eye rubbing were cited as causes of the infestation in the actual 5-year-old patient. According to the physicians, the human botfly lays its eggs on the torsos of other insects (such as mosquitoes), which then transfer the eggs to human or animal hosts by direct contact. When a botfly egg hatches, the larva burrows into the host's skin head-first and begins feeding.
The human botfly is found mainly in Central and South America, but there are other species of flies known to cause myiasis in North America, mainly blowflies. According to an epidemiological study conducted in 2000, most cases of myiasis acquired in the United States are the result of blowflies laying eggs in pre-existing wounds.
None of which is quite as frightening as the thought that any of us could become similarly infected simply by rubbing dust into our own eyes, but, in the inimitable words of folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand, "The truth never stands in the way of a good story."
Last updated: 12/05/02