EMS1 Staff
NEW ORLEANS — A woman lost her arm to flesh-eating bacteria after injecting “bath salts” in New Orleans, according to a report published this month in the journal Orthopedics.
The 34-year-old woman arrived at hospital with pain, swelling and a small red puncture mark on her right forearm, NPR reports. The doctors diagnosed her with a skin infection. The prescribed intravenous antibiotics improved the situation.
Two days later, the swelling returned, and the woman told doctors she had injected herself with “bath salts,” an increasingly popular stimulant drug, at a party before she initially came to the hospital.
The doctors discovered dead muscle and a necrotizing fasciitis infection that advanced up her arm before their eyes when they cut open the skin on the woman’s arm. The medical team had to amputate the woman’s arm and shoulder and perform a radical mastectomy and skin grafts to stop the infection.
The woman survived and is in rehab. Her case appears to be the first known of a person contracting a flesh-eating disease from injecting “bath salts.”
“It’s one of those horrible things that starts out as no big deal,” Robert Russo, an orthopedic resident who helped treat the woman, told NPR. “Then the person ends up losing an extremity.”