Man Goes For Routine Check-Up Only To Find A Fly In His Stomach – News18

In a bizarre incident, a group of doctors found an intact body of a fly inside a man’s large intestine. This discovery was made when a 63-year-old man in Missouri, USA, was undergoing a routine colonoscopy procedure. A colonoscopy procedure allows the doctors to get a full picture of one’s colon through a long flexible tube that is equipped with a tiny light and a camera. During the colonoscopy, the doctors were left shocked when they saw an intact fly inside the man’s transverse colon in the large intestine. They prodded the fly with the camera and confirmed that it was dead. The fly’s intact body showed that it was not ingested. When the patient was told about this discovery he was confused and surprised.

He informed the doctors that he had only consumed clear liquids before the colonoscopy as suggested. He did not recall accidentally swallowing any fly and only remembered eating pizza and lettuce as his latest meal. The man also said that he did not have any symptoms to suggest that he had ingested a fly.

As per The Independent, this discovery of an intact fly was published in the American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Matthew Bechtold, the chief of Gastroenterology at the University of Missouri, who was there during the colonoscopy procedure theorised two ways through which the fly might have entered the man’s body, even though none of these theories seem likely.

His first theory is that the fly reached the large intestine through the man’s mouth. However, Bechtold clarifies that this is unlikely because in normal circumstances the “upper digestive enzymes and stomach acid would have degraded the fly.” However, the fly’s body looked undamaged.

The second theory that Bechtold and other doctors propose is that the fly entered the body via the man’s rectum. But Bechtold also dismisses this hypothesis and said, “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.”

The American Journal of Gastroenterology lists that previously there have been some very rare cases where insects have remained intact inside the digestive system and laid eggs or larvae inside the gastrointestinal tract causing cases of intestinal myiasis. There are also cases of parasites like pinworms, seatworms, or threadworms affecting one’s intestines. However, an undigested fly has never been spotted.