If Your New Tattoo Hasn’t Yet Healed, Swimming in the Ocean Could Be Deadly Rita Rubin - Forbes
go to original June 3, 2017

Oh, the irony.

The 31-year-old man had gotten a large tattoo on his right calf of a crucifix and praying hands, the words “Jesus is my life” in script below them.

One week later, he developed a fever and chills and redness of the skin on both legs. The next day, he was admitted to Parkland Hospital in Dallas. His blood pressure was 62/52, and his legs were extremely tender. The day after that, multiple organs, including his kidneys, failed.

Two months after that, despite aggressive treatment that included several antibiotics and the removal of dead tissue , he died. The cause: septic shock as a result of necrotizing fasciitis, better known as “flesh-eating bacteria.” In a report published this week in the journal BMJ Case Reports, doctors concluded that he contracted the infection when he went swimming in the Gulf of Mexico five days after getting his calf tattooed.

If only he’d waited another week or two before plunging into the sea. By then, the skin wound from his tattoo would have healed, reducing the chance that Vibrio vulnificus, a lethal type of bacteria common in coastal ocean water, would have infected him, Dr. Nicholas Hendren told me. (In the United States, 95% of serious infections with V. vulnificus stem from eating raw oysters along the Gulf Coast, nearly all of which harbor the bacteria during the summer months, according to the case report.)

Now, the unidentified man wasn’t in the best of health to begin with. As Hendren and his coauthors noted, the patient had alcoholic cirrhosis, or liver disease, and drank a six-pack of beer daily. Chronic liver disease is a classic risk factor for infection with V. vulnificus, according to the case report. In fact, healthy patients appear to account for fewer than 5% of all reported U.S. cases of sepsis, or blood poisoning, due to V. vulnificus, which has a death rate of 50% to 60%.

...Tattoos and other body modifications are a growing trend worldwide, with around 10% to 20% or people in industrialized countries sporting at least one, according to a review article published last year by German researchers.

Read the rest at Forbes

Related: Tattoo Aftercare Bible - The Ultimate Care Instructions Guide (Authority Tattoo)

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