A Case of Pharyngitis Caused by Clinostomum complanatum / 대한이비인후과학회지

ABSTRACT

A 13-year-old female patient visited the otolaryngology clinic with complaints of a moving foreign body sensation in her throat. The patient used to eat raw fish and she had eaten mullet sashimi a week before. During laryngoscopy for the pharynx and larynx, a motile fluke was found attached to the posterolateral nasopharyngeal wall. The worm was easily removed and identified as Clinostomum complanatum (C. complanatum) after morphological observation. C. complanatum is a digenetic trematode which usually infects fish-eating birds. Human infection by C. complanatum is very rare, and if a human eats infected raw fish, the worm can be on the pharyngeal or laryngeal mucosa. Human cases of parasitic C. complanatum infection have been reported twice in Korea, with the present report being the first case in the otolaryngology field.