An 83-year-old Malaysian woman died, and her 84-year-old husband is fighting for his life in the hospital after they ate puffer fish last week, according to a new report.
The couple’s daughter, Ng Ai Lee, 51, said her father purchased the puffer fish — a delicacy known to contain extremely potent poisons — from a local fish shop on March 25.
“My parents have been buying fish from the same fishmonger for many years, so my father did not think twice about it,” Lee told The Star.
“He would not have knowingly bought something so deadly to eat and put their lives in danger.”
Ling Tian Soon — the health and unity committee chairman for Johor, in southern Malaysia — said shortly after the couple cleaned and cooked the fish for lunch, Lim Siew Guan began to shiver and experience breathing difficulties.
“Her husband also began displaying similar symptoms about an hour later,” Soon told The Star.
Soon said the couple’s son took them to the hospital, with Guan pronounced dead that evening.
“The ’cause of death’ is given as ‘food poisoning with neurological manifestation resulting in respiratory failure with cardiac dysrhythmia possibly due to ciguatera toxin or tetrodotoxin ingestion’, from the puffer fish,” Soon said in a statement to the outlet.
Lee, who lives in Kuala Lumpur, said she rushed to be by her mother’s side, but she was too late.
“I was devastated,” she told The Star. “The pain and emotions that I felt at the time were indescribable because it was just too unexpected.”
She told the publication her father is in a coma in the intensive care unit.
“I am prepared for the worst because the doctor told us that even if he is able to pull through the ordeal, he might not be the same any more, due to his old age,” she said.
According to the Food and Drug Administration, puffer fish may contain the potent and deadly toxins tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin, which cannot be destroyed by cooking or freezing.
The FDA says the central nervous system toxins are more deadly than cyanide, with symptoms, such as tingling and dizziness, typically starting 20 minutes to two hours after ingesting the fish.
A delicacy in Japan, puffer fish must be properly cleaned and prepared in a special manner to remove the toxin-containing organs, so the flesh of the fish doesn’t become contaminated.
Because of this complicated process, commercial importation of puffer fish into the US is heavily restricted.
