Doctors at a hospital in south-eastern China’s Fujian Province recently reported the unusual case of a man whose non-stop coughing had apparently been caused by a leech attached to his throat.

Last Friday, the unnamed man arrived at the Wuping County Hospital in the city of Longyan complaining of almost non-stop coughing over the past two months. He had become increasingly worried about his condition after coughing up phlegm and blood, so he finally decided to seek medical attention. Doctors at the hospital’s respiratory department initially recommended a CT scan, but when that didn’t reveal anything, they decided to try a more invasive procedure called “bronchoscopy”, which allowed them to inspect the patient’s air passages with a small camera. That’s how they found a leech living in his throat.

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A Chinese man recently had an inch-long leech yanked out of his nose after hatching and living there for at least three months.

The man, surnamed Pan, went to Dongguan Chang’an Hospital, in China’s Guangdong province, after experiencing constant nose bleeds for 10 days. Liu Yuxing, an ear, nose and throat doctor at the hospital, immediately suspected that a leech was the. He had never once found one in a patient’s nose, but had read about similar cases in medical journals. It turned out that his hunch was right, as an endoscopic investigation revealed a bloodsucker firmly attached to the man’s nostril.

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