A bizarre photo claiming to show a live cockroach inside a chest X-ray from Kolhapur has been buzzing across social media and fooling many. The story circulating online says that a patient was rushed to Mumbai for surgery after local doctors spotted the insect in the scan. But when Mumbai doctors examined him, they reportedly found nothing and suggested the cockroach must have “crawled into the X-ray machine” in Kolhapur.
It sounds dramatic but none of it is true.
When looked into the claim, not a single credible report about such an incident surfaced. A reverse image search gave away the real story: the viral X-ray is actually a doctored version of an image found on radlines.org, a free radiology website.
The original photo, uploaded by radiologist Mikael Häggström, shows the perfectly normal chest X-ray of a 21-year-old woman who suffered mild pain after a soccer collision. No cockroach, no surgery, no panic just a routine scan.
Someone digitally added the insect to the image, turning it into a sensational fake that spread like wildfire. This isn’t the first time such “foreign object in X-ray” hoaxes have gone viral, either.
So yes, the Kolhapur cockroach X-ray is nothing more than a cleverly edited fake.
But here’s where things get truly interesting: while the viral image is fake, an actual case involving a cockroach inside the lungs did happen just not in Kolhapur.
In a real-life medical shocker from Kochi, doctors at Amrita Hospital removed a four-centimetre-long cockroach from the lungs of a 55-year-old man in February 2024. The patient arrived with severe breathing difficulty and a troubling sensation that something had entered his airway.
He had been on respiratory support with a tracheostomy tube in his neck, and doctors suspect the cockroach may have crawled in through this opening.
Although his X-ray initially showed nothing out of the ordinary, a bronchoscopy performed by the ENT team revealed the chilling truth a cockroach lodged deep inside his left lung.
A specialised team led by Dr. Tinku Joseph, Head of Interventional Pulmonology, quickly stepped in and successfully removed the insect. Thankfully, the patient recovered and has since been discharged. Experts warn that such rare incidents can occur if breathing tubes are not properly sealed.
All in all
The viral chest X-ray showing a cockroach is completely fake and created by digitally editing an original radiology image. However, a separate and genuine case from Kochi proves that insects can occasionally enter the human airway, as doctors successfully removed a live cockroach from a 55-year-old man’s lung. This highlights the importance of verifying viral claims while also recognising that rare medical incidents can happen.
This fake news spread mainly because shocking medical visuals attract quick attention, and people often share dramatic images without checking their authenticity.
