ACC’s $520k payout for cockroach-related claims over five years

By Emma Ricketts of RNZ

It sounds like something from nightmares, but ACC figures suggest that having a cockroach stuck in your ear may not be as uncommon as you’d think.

ACC has received 326 new claims relating to cockroaches in the past five years, with the total number of active cockroach-related claims costing taxpayers nearly $520,000 since 2019.

GPs Dr John Cameron, from Westmere Medical Centre, and Dr Tim Malloy, of Coast To Coast Health Care in Wellsford, think that most of these claims would be the result of insects in ears.

Neither has ever encountered a cockroach, but they’ve both removed plenty of moths from patients' ears.

Cameron said the sensation caused by the insects is awful, but they don’t actually pose much risk.

“Them going down your ear canal, in itself, is not all that dangerous or nasty. There’s a piece of tissue at the end of your ear canal - called the ear drum - and a cockroach can’t get through that. So it’s not going to burrow down inside your brain.”

Those are hardly comforting words for Hamilton resident David Totman, who was half asleep in the early hours of the morning a few years ago when he felt something tickling his cheek.

He brushed it away, and felt it go scuttling into his ear.

It turned out to be a 25-millimetre long cockroach.

Totman says the feeling was excruciating.

“It literally feels like it’s in the middle of your head. They have incredibly scratchy legs, so the noise and discomfort they make is right in your brain. It’s unbearable.”

Can you kill a cockroach in your ear?

Totman’s first instinct was to put his head under running water, but that only made things worse.

“If you can imagine trying to drown a cockroach, all it does is get extremely agitated and it scrabbles around even more.”

Totman’s son quickly Googled the best course of action, which is to pour oil in the ear.

Cameron said that is the fastest way to subdue any insect in the ear.

“To stop the thing from creating noise and irritation, you want to gently kill it,” he said. “You can do that by suffocating it with any non-caustic vegetable oil. So long as you have normal ears without any perforations, filling the ear with that oil will stop the insect moving.”

Then, Cameron advises making an appointment with the doctor.

“Don’t try to take it out yourself - you shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear. Go to your doctor and tell them what’s going on. They will rinse it out, suck it out or use a pair of fine forceps to lift the insect out.”

This will be where the ACC claims come in. Dr Malloy imagines most of the ACC payouts will be covering doctors' or nurses' consultations.

“I can’t imagine anyone is getting compensated for being off work because they had a cockroach in their ear,” he said, laughing, adding that he’s actually surprised how low the number of claims is.

“Seventy or so a year across five million people, that’s actually not that common.”

Malloy adds that the medical consultations don’t necessarily have to be urgent.

“If you can silence the beast, you don’t even need to go into the doctor that night or day. That can save people a lot of angst, they don’t need to rush to an urgent care or an emergency department to get it attended to.”

Totman said he even went to work with his cockroach in his ear, before making an appointment with the doctor.

“I asked my colleagues, what do you do when you have a bug in your ear? They recommended I go to the ear clinic.”

The nurse who suctioned it out said it was far from the first insect she had extracted from someone’s ear.

After the ordeal, Totman kept the specimen in his wallet for a while so he could pull it out and show people.

“I produced it to spook people at get-togethers. I’d say, hey! Have a look at this cockroach. This was in my ear!”

- RNZ

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