Story By: John Feng, Sub-Editor:  Alex Cope, Agency: Asia Wire Report

This is the moment a doctor finds a tiny louse crawling around a woman’s ear and feeding on her eardrum after she complained of hearing scratching noises for two days.

Ms Liu, the patient in her early 20s, sought the help of ear, nose and throat specialist Bai Zhigang, who is the head ENT specialist at the Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University.

The woman from Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang Province in north-eastern China, said she had been hearing gnawing and scratching noises in her left ear for two days.

But Doctor Bai did not find anything inside her ear canal and at first believed she may have been suffering from a malfunctioning nervous system.

The medic said: “I had a look and didn’t find anything out of the ordinary, but the patient was adamant there was a sound in her ear.”

Doctor Bai inspected Ms Liu’s left ear again, this time using a 30x lens on his otoscope.

He said: “A small, white animal – with claws – was climbing along the surface of her eardrum.

“It was smaller than 1 millimetre – very difficult to see with the naked eye.”

The doctor identified it as a common louse, and the video from the hospital shows the tiny parasite wandering around Ms Liu’s ear.

Doctor Bai found the insect had been chewing on Ms Liu’s eardrum because it had nothing else to eat.

The parasite was sucked out of the patient’s ear, with the doctor warning delayed treatment could have led to inflammation of the eardrum.

Ms Liu said she practises good personal hygiene but revealed she keeps pet cats.

Doctor Bai said: “She adopts stray cats. She has about three or four. 

“Hugging them and cuddling them likely caused their parasites to jump onto her.”

The ViralTab page is created by and dedicated to professional, independent freelance journalists. It is a place for us to showcase our work. When our news is sold to our media partners, we will include the link here.