A Minnesota brother and sister found themselves in a hospital after taking a bite of a banned, deadly poisonous species of pufferfish.
The pufferfish, which is related to an Asian delicacy widely known as fugu, caused the 30-year-old man and his 33-year-old sister to experience numbed teeth, weakness and shortness of breath, reported NBC News. They symptoms began just 30 minutes after tasting the fish.
"The patient stated that he had purchased dried fish described as globefish from a street vendor in New York City and transported the fish to Minnesota himself," doctors, led by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Dr. Jonathan Deeds, wrote in their report on the situation.
Pufferfish have a poison on them called tetrodotoxin, which could be lethal to humans. The fish can be consumed by humans if it's properly prepared by a specially trained professional because of this poison. Otherwise consuming the fish is very dangerous.
The FDA has very specific warnings on the consumption of pufferfish:
"The FDA is advising consumers only to eat puffer fish (also known as fugu, bok, blowfish, globefish, swellfish, balloonfish, or sea squab) from two known safe sources. The safe sources are 1) imported puffer fish that have been processed and prepared by specially trained and certified fish cutters in the city of Shimonoseki, Japan, and 2) puffer fish caught in the mid-Atlantic coastal waters of the United States, typically between Virginia and New York. Puffer fish from all other sources potentially contain deadly toxins and therefore are not considered safe."
The siblings who were most recently poisoned by the fish immediately went to a Minneapolis hospital, reported NBC News. There wasn't much that the hospital could do for them - besides keeping an eye on their symptoms in case they worsened - so they both left the hospital against medical advice.
Public health officials later went to track down the man and woman to learn more about the source of the poisonous fish, but they essentially disappeared.
"Visits to the two patients' home were made by both public health officials and law enforcement; however, current residents of the home stated that they had no knowledge of the patients' whereabouts. There was no labeling on the fish packaging, and all attempts to determine the source of the fish were unsuccessful," the public health officials said according to NBC News.
Last week a British family also fell ill after eating a pufferfish. The fisherman who caught the fish accidently mixed the fish in with the rest of his catch, so it wasn't prepared to the special pufferfish standards to make it safe to eat.
