What to do if you find maggots growing in your eye

What would you do if you found maggots growing in your eyeballs? Albert Lin, a research scientist and engineer with National Geographic, has found out the best way to treat this toe-curling problem.

Lin was visiting Mongolia looking for the lost tomb of Genghis Khan when one of his colleagues developed a very swollen eye. In a video, he said: "What do you do if, for example, you wake up one morning and a fly has laid a bunch of eggs in your eyeball and there's maggots growing in them?"

He added that when the sufferer pulled back his eyelid, they could see a maggot had grown in his eye. Luckily, one of their Mongolian colleagues was there to save the day with wisdom of the local nomads.

"My Mongolian colleague said 'I've got this' and grabs this big slab of goat meat and slaps it on this guy's eye. He had this big bloody piece of meat sticking onto his eye and it worked. The maggots crawled out one by one and the next thing you know there were seven maggots that had crawled out."

Explaining how they had found this out, Lin added: "Having flies lay eggs in your eyes actually happens more often than you would think [on the Mongolian steppe], so they've figured out a pretty simple solution."

Lin is working on the The Valley of the Khans Project. The team had been working in the remote Ikh Khorig region, or 'forbidden zone', using non-invasive technology to look for the lost tomb. He was also behind the crowdsourcing project to analyse satellite images to search for Genghis Khan's resting place from space.