Monday, January 10, 2022

Case of the Week 668

This week's case is a lovely cross-section of an arthropod embedded within the epidermis. The patient is a middle-aged woman with a lesion on her foot after returning from the Caribbean on holiday. Here is a still image of the digital slide:


Click HERE to zoom in for higher power.

Identification?

3 comments:

Blaine A. Mathison said...

'foot' lesion?...'digit-al'....sorry if my joke is a little Tunga cheek!

Anonymous said...

The geography and infection site do point in the direction of a vicious chica. I believe seeing the cuticle, several developing eggs on the left half, and the gut parts on the right.
Florida Fan

Kosta Mumcuoglu said...

Quite surely is Tunga penetrans. I am asking myself if there are two specimens in this histologic picture. As I wrote earlier, until now, only T. penetrans and T. trimamillata have been found parasitizing humans and domestic animals.
T. penetrans is largely present in Latin America (including the Caribbean islands), and in sub-Saharan Africa, while T. trimamillata is known from Equator, Peru and Brazil (Pampiglione et al. 2004, 2009; Linardi et al. 2013).