A patient about 50 years old went to Chinese hospital suffered from a skin lesion that caused him pain in wrist. He went through several clinics, and they all came to the conclusion that this eczema. So he was treated with steroid creams and antihistamine pills. If it were normal eczema, with this treatment, the problem would quickly disappear. But he didn’t. That’s why in Fujian Medical University was subjected to a second, much more exhaustive study. And with him it was shown that this injury was not eczema, but the result of a piece of caterpillar inserted under his skin.
They came to this conclusion for two reasons. On the one hand, since microscopic analysis biopsy wrist revealed formations in the form short lobes with hollow interiors surrounded by leukocytes. It seemed like a typical reaction to an unauthorized intrusion under the skin of a foreign agent. But what? The answer came by asking the patient about what he was doing just before the alleged eczema appeared. Specifically five months ago.
Looking back, he remembered that he had Apple tree of his patio and that upstairs he found a lot sponge moth caterpillars (Limantry unpaired). One would have thought that he had an allergic reaction to the exposure to his stinging hair. But the situation was even more tense. And the thing is, he wasn’t exposed to burning hairbut some of them had been under his skin for five months.
Mole that has been renamed
On the apple tree, the protagonist of this story came into contact with a large number of caterpillars fluffy moth.
This is a Eurasian butterfly, known until recently as gypsy moth. The name was changed to avoid falling into racism by associating it with a specific ethnic group. But with one name or another, it is still a moth capable of causing great disasters.
The downy moth, formerly known as the gypsy moth, is the cause of many pests.
In 2020, for example, it caused an uproar in Washington over a blight that left much of the state’s forests nearly bare.
Perhaps that is what was happening in this man’s yard. Moth caterpillars filled his apple tree, and he decided to get up and see what happened. Once there, he made contact with some, but it didn’t occur to him that their hair could dig into his skin. So when eczema developed on her wrist shortly afterwards, she didn’t even notice the recent caterpillar infestation on the apple tree in her yard.
Moral of caterpillar hair tangle with eczema
Biopsy analysis showed that after contact with apple tree caterpillars, some bristles (hair) they were built into his skin with enough depth that it was not visible from the outside.
Given this situation, the treatment that has been used so far has been changed. For this, they were given 0.5 ml of betamethasone, consisting of 2 mg of betamethasone sodium phosphate and 5 mg of betamethasone dipropionatoin in 1 ml. The mixture is injected into the lesion intralesional injection once a month for 5 months. After all this time, the trauma caused by the caterpillar completely disappeared.
After appropriate treatment, the lesion disappeared after 5 months.
The case was registered in BMJ case reports, in a study in which its authors call for a diagnosis of this type of case. In particular, they are intended for healthcare professionals who care for patients with Allergic dermatitisso that they take into account both occupational and environmental exposure history. So cases like this 50-year-old man could have been diagnosed much sooner, which would have lessened the anguish of visiting clinic after clinic, getting various treatments for eczema that never really existed.
Source: Hiper Textual
