Nostril-wedged maggots of Portsmouth: Otorhinolaryngologist's expert opinion explained

Oh, I don’t think anyone is questioning the reality of myiasis. The sources on nasal myiasis cited in the paper you link are mostly in India, Brazil, and the like, places where fly species that are responsible for cutaneous myiasis are readily found; the risk factors for nasal myiasis, often caused by those same fly species, are chiefly things like leprosy and syphilis leading to secondary atrophic rhinitis. The only papers I could find involving myiasis attributable to fly species commonly found in New England involved a Danish patient with a broken nose and an elderly Korean patient in a coma. I have no trouble believing that bacteria or fungi could grow up there, especially in the presence of food; those are ubiquitous in the environment, and there’s plenty of air passing through the nose to carry spores. Talk of maggots, though, especially in the absence of published case studies, does little more than undermine the credibility of the sources. That said, if this isn’t a fiction, I’d love to read the case studies. I’m weird like that.

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