During elective surgery to repair a painless groin hernia, surgeons operating on a 71-year-old man were startled to find a living, 26cm (10.2-inch) tapeworm lodged in his abdomen, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The find was made stranger still by the patient's revelation that the same thing had happened to him four years earlier, when an 18cm worm was removed during a hernia operation on his other side but was never identified or treated.

The man had shown no symptoms beyond the bulge, and his blood work was normal, giving no hint of a parasitic infection. Surgeons performing the laparoscopic procedure spotted something whitish and stringy wedged between his bladder and pubic bone, and used forceps and several gentle tugs to extract the worm, which continued to writhe on the table. Genetic testing identified it as Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, which causes the rare human infection sparganosis; humans are accidental hosts in whom the larvae wander the body, and the man's only recalled exposure was eating raw snake meat during military service 50 years earlier. He was subsequently placed on anti-parasitic medication to kill off any remaining worms.