A Vietnamese man who started experiencing throat discomfort and speaking with a hoarse voice discovered that he had a 6-cm-long leech sucking blood from his throat.

Ever wake up with a soar throat and a scratchy voice? Of course, you have, but you probably never thought it was more than a mild cold. A 53-year-old Vietnamese man suffering these symptoms thought the same thing until he started spitting blood, at which point he realized things were worse than they appeared. At first, he tried identifying the cause himself, by opening his mouth and looking in the mirror, but he couldn’t see much apart from what looked like a brown mass in the upper part of his throat. The man panicked and immediately sought professional medical assistance; that’s how he learned that he had a leech attached to his throat.

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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 63-year-old Vietnamese woman who recently underwent a laparoscopic procedure to have a tumour from her throat removed was shocked to hear that the doctors removed a six-inch leech from her throat instead. The parasite had reportedly been living in the woman’s throat for about three months.

The unnamed woman from Vietnam’s mountainous Ha Giang Province had been complaining about severe headaches, frequent nasal congestion and a constant sensation of mucous fluid flowing down the throat, for several weeks. She eventually checked into a local hospital where ENT (ear nose and throat) specialists performed various tests and discovered an unidentified mass in her throat. The woman was scheduled for laparoscopic surgery to have the mass – believed to be a tumour – removed, but during the procedure, doctors were shocked to find a live leech attached to the woman’s throat.

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