Despite the last two cases, you're still eating fish for dinner. This time, on a trip to Japan, you try a local delicacy. Within minutes of eating the dish above, you note weakness, dizziness, paresthesias of the face and extremities, and nausea. Since you always carry around a trusty reflex hammer, you test your reflexes and find they're absent. The fear with this disease is paralysis and hypotension. The toxin is shown below. Cool ring structure!
Challenge: What's your diagnosis?First image shown under Creative Commons Attribution License. Second image is in the public domain.
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5 comments:
Ooh Japanese pufferfish! And yes, I really do carry my reflex hammer around with me everywhere.
Is it Paralytic shellfish poisoning? Saxitoxoin? but i thought this was commoner along the south eastern coast of america??
oh wait.. is it puffer fish toxin? the geography just hit me...
wait! those are shells in the bag of food in the picture! back to PSP?
.... so confused :(
haha...the picture is hard to see, but it's pufferfish.
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Dinner 3
Pufferfish poisoning is due to tetrodotoxin which concentrates in the liver, visceral organs, and skin of the fish. It binds sodium channels to prevent sodium influx into nerve axons.
Sources: UpToDate; Wikipedia.
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