Puffer Fish Poisoning (Reading Class)

Poisoning  

Puffer poisoning usually results from consumption of incorrectly prepared puffer soup, fugu chiri, or occasionally from raw puffer meat, sashimi fugu. While chiri is much more likely to cause death, sashimi fugu often causes intoxication, light-headedness, and numbness of the lips, and is often eaten for this reason. Puffer's (tetrodotoxin) poisoning deadens the tongue and lips, and induces dizziness and vomiting, followed by numbness and prickling over the body, rapid heart rate, decreased blood pressure, and muscle paralysis. The toxin paralyzes diaphragm muscles and stops the person who has ingested it from breathing. People who live longer than 24 hours typically survive, although possibly after a coma lasting several days. Some people claim to have remained fully conscious throughout the coma, and can often recount events that occurred while they were supposedly unconscious. The paralysis reduces oxygen demands of the body dramatically, but because the toxin does not cross the blood-brain barrier, neural activity in the brain and from the eyes and ears are generally intact. In Voodoo, puffer's poison must be part of the mixture given to the victim to make them a "zombie", most likely because the paralysis and pseudo-comatose effect simulate the death portion of traditional zombie creation.
Pufferfish, called pakpao in Thailand, are usually consumed by mistake. They are often cheaper than other fish, and because they contain inconsistent levels of toxins between fish and season, there is little awareness or monitoring of the danger. Consumers are regularly hospitalized or die because cooks do not know which organs are not safe.
Treatment consists of supportive care and intestinal decontamination with gastric lavage and activated charcoal. Case reports suggest that anticholinesterases such as edrophonium may be effective.
Saxitoxin, the cause of paralytic shellfish poisoning and red tide can also be found in certain puffers. Cases of neurological symptoms, including numbness and tingling of the lips and mouth, have been reported to rise after the consumption of puffers caught in the area of Titusville, Florida. The symptoms generally resolve within hours to days, although one affected individual required intubation for 72 hours. As a result, Florida banned the harvesting of puffers from certain bodies of water.
It is not believed that puffers produce toxins themselves, as puffer fish kept in tanks or fish farms are totally free of either toxin. The gastric contents of shellfish prey are believed to carry the toxins or their precursors, which are stored in the puffers organs.

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Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraodontidae