A girl who was suffering from agonising stomach pains in hospital was discovered to be riddled with tape worms, after her mother had made her eat them to lose weight before a beauty pageant.

At first, nurses thought the teenage girl could be pregnant when she was admitted to an emergency room in Florida, USA, with severe stomach pain, but an ultrasound showed that she was not.

Nurses did find that her intestines were swollen however, and after taking a trip to the toilet, they discovered the real source of her pain.

“It was a toilet bowl full of tapeworms,” Maricar Cabral-Osorio, a nurse who had attended the girl, told the TV programme Untold Stories of the E.R.

“It was so gross, she had pooped all these tapeworms. There were a couple that were very long and wiggling around trying to get out of the toilet bowl,” she said.

The story came to light when the show aired on Discovery’s ‘Fit & Health’ channel, reported United Press International.

It emerged on the show that the mother had bought tapeworm eggs and in Mexico and forced her daughter to take them in order to lose weight ahead of a beauty pageant.

“We were wondering, how did she get those tapeworms? And then you saw the mom turn white,” Cabral-Osorio added.

“The mom was apologizing to the girl. It’s like, ‘I’m so sorry. You know, I did it just to make you a little skinnier. You needed some help before we went on the pageant’,” she added.