“I found this, what I think to be, worm in my toilet”, states this reader in his submission. “Do you know if this is a worm? If so, what kind?” he asks about the long, squiggly, yellow worm pictured below. “I don’t believe it to be parasitic as I work from home, have my bowel movements in the morning, and use the restroom all day. I also believe I cleaned the toilet that day, based on its condition in the picture.”

At first, we thought this might be a centipede, given the coloration and the black head, as well as the length. However, the ‘squiggliness’ of its body, and the apparent lack of legs shot this theory down quickly. So with that said, we thought about the worms (and worm-like organisms) that have shown up in people’s toilets (like earthworms, drain fly larvae, leeches, or bloodworms), and this also does not look like any of those.

As such, we can unfortunately not provide a concrete identification of this creature. Despite that, there is still some general advice we can provide our reader. Firstly, we recommend that our reader simply move the worm outside, but that he do so with caution. Since we do not know what it is, we do not know if it can bite/sting/secrete fluids which can cause pain or irritation. For that reason, we suggest scooping it up onto a dustpan using an object to avoid skin-to-skin contact whilst moving it. Secondly, if he wishes to, our reader could take this worm to his local county extension office to have it physically examined. They will have a better chance at identifying the worm. Lastly, if he does grow concerned that this worm may have come from him or is causing him health issues, then we advise consulting a medical parasitologist. To find one, what we can recommend is that our reader do one or more of the following:

1) Search for a medical parasitologist in his area using this directory of medical parasitology consultants: https://www.astmh.org/for-astmh-members/clinical-consultants-directory.
2) Search for a local parasitologist by doing a Google search for “medical parasitologist (name of the closest big city)” or “tropical medicine specialist (name of the closest big city)”.
3) Get in touch with Dr. Omar Amin at the Parasitology Center at https://www.parasitetesting.com.

In conclusion, we are not sure what the worm our reader found is. Nonetheless, we hope that some of the information in this article proves useful and we wish our reader the very best.