Parasites are pretty amazing when you think about them, I mean yeah, they’re disgusting, but they’re pretty awesome too. They’re perfectly designed to get inside of you, survive inside of you without killing you and then manage to get back outside to spawn. I find it hard enough to find my way home of an evening, imagine navigating a giant organism’s lungs and digestive system in pitch black, kudos to you weird worms.

Generally parasites aren’t lethal because if you die, they die. Their plan is to keep you alive to feed them for as long as possible. Although they aren’t always fatal they are always pretty disgusting. It’s the idea of something big living inside you that’s so hard to stomach.

Here’s 5 of the oddest and most minging ones known to man:

1) Guinea Worm

The Guinea worm, or Dracunculiasis is a horrid critter. Infections are most prevalent in South Sudan, so avoid that destination if you don’t want a worm in you.

The guinea worm spawn infects water fleas, the human drinks the water and boom, you’re an unwilling host. The flea digests away in your stomach acid leaving the guinea worm to grow.

There’s no symptoms for a couple of years as the worm grows and lives as happy as Larry in your body. They can grow up to three feet in length without you even knowing they’re there.

When it wants to spread its seed in comes up to the surface of your skin and causes a burning sensation. The parasite figures that a burning sensation will make you put your arm in water, when you do this it bursts through the surface and fires millions of eggs into the water to start the cycle again.

The worm can slowly be removed with a stick over a series of weeks but the sores left behind can sometimes take ages to heal and get all infected and putrid. Interestingly the guinea worm only infects humans. Aren’t we lucky?

2) Filarial Worm

Ahhh… mosquitoes. Not content with spreading malaria they also dish out filarial worms to people too, how kind. There’s a whole host of filarial worm species that can cause a variety of problems for human hosts.

Basically the mosquito sucks up the blood of an infected animal with filarial larva within. It then shares these little gits with the next creature it dines on. The worm grows within you, silently tucking in to your nutritious innards for a year or so without notifying you of its presence.

As time goes on these little worms migrate to your lymph nodes. The lymph system is important for draining away fluids, so if it gets clogged up with, say… a butt load of worms… it fails. Massively.

This means fluid builds up all over the shop, particularly in your legs and balls and causes elephantiasis. Elephantiasis is neither pleasant nor easily rectified.

3) Bot Fly

There’s a few types of bot fly and only one infects humans, and boy does it do some disgusting work. The larvae drop directly onto human skin and the warmth spurs them on to burrow into the flesh beneath.

Once safe and warm in your living tissues the spikes of the larvae can be pretty painful for the host so you’re going to want to remove it.

One method is to cover the hole in your skin through which the larvae breath with Vaseline or Sellotape or something. This kills the creature through asphyxiation.

Then you have to widen the hole and gently pull out the carcass. This must be done very carefully indeed because if the bot fly bugger bursts and releases the chemicals inside, it can cause sever anaphylactic shock.

4) Candiru Fish

Yes, gentlemen, it is the stuff of nightmares.

This cute harmless looking fish thing is your nemesis. This is the chap that we’ve all heard about that climbs up your column of wee and buries itself into your urethra. I’m here to tell you that that doesn’t really happen.

I mean if you think about it it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Yes, salmon can climb waterfalls using all of their might, but a small fish swimming up a fast flowing jet of urine? No chance.

But the candiru is still no angel. If you’re swimming in infected water without wearing the appropriate under-crackers it will get into you via any orifice it sees fit. It can then wriggle its way far, far up into your nether regions and sit there having a gay old time at your expense.

Candiru have spikes along their body which make it an extremely painful thing to remove. They’ve been found up as far as the bile duct and once they’ve got themselves in there you’re going to need invasive surgery to liberate them.

5) Ascaris

Ugh. Ascaris is grim. It basically starves children from the inside.

It lays its eggs in poop, if any of this is accidentally ingested the eggs hatch in your stomach. From your stomach it’s carried to your lungs where it moves up to your throat and is swallowed deep down into your intestines. It then lays more eggs which are carried out in your next bowel movement.

The worms are so large they can literally starve a child to death. Added to starvation you will experience a reduction in cognitive ability and skin inflammation as your body spins out. Around a billion people are infected with ascaris as we speak.

Thankfully for me, living in cold, rainy, miserable England none of these horrors ever come to visit. So sleep sound my friends, and whatever you do don’t think about having a hook worm infection in your eyes that gets so bad it causes your eye to swell and explode covering you and your friends in eye puss. OK?