In what has been described as a medical first, scientists have announced that they found a live 8cm (3in) worm in the brain of an Australian woman.

The woman, was not identified but doctors said that the “string-like worm” was pulled from the patient’s damaged frontal lobe tissue during surgery in Canberra last year.

The red parasite could have been there for up to two months, according to a BBC report.

Researchers are now warning that the rare occurrence shows the increased danger of diseases and infections being passed from animals to people.

The Ophidascaris robertsi roundworm is common in carpet pythons – non-venomous snakes found across much of Australia.

“Everyone [in] that operating theatre got the shock of their life when [the surgeon] took some forceps to pick up an abnormality and the abnormality turned out to be a wriggling, live 8cm light red worm,” said Sanjaya Senanayake, an infectious diseases doctor at Canberra Hospital.

“Even if you take away the yuck factor, this is a new infection never documented before in a human being.”

Scientists say the woman most likely caught the roundworm after collecting a type of native grass, Warrigal greens, beside a lake near where she lived.

In the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, Mehrab Hossain, an Australian expert in parasitology, wrote that he suspects she became an “accidental host” after using the foraged plants – contaminated by python faeces and parasite eggs – for cooking.