In a case of an oft-overlooked food preparation risk, a 40-year-old man showed up to an allergy clinic in Texas with a severe, burning rash on both hi

Man suffers chemical burn that lasted months after squeezing limes

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2024-11-28 12:30:03

In a case of an oft-overlooked food preparation risk, a 40-year-old man showed up to an allergy clinic in Texas with a severe, burning rash on both his hands that had developed two days earlier. A couple of days later, it blistered. And a few weeks after that, the skin darkened and scaled. After several months, the skin on his hands finally returned to normal.

It turns out that just before developing the nasty skin eruption, the man had manually squeezed a dozen limes, then headed to an outdoor soccer game without applying sunscreen. His doctors diagnosed the man's rash as a classic case of phytophotodermatitis, according to a case report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The condition is caused by toxic substances found in plants (phyto) that react with UV light (photo) to cause a burning, blistering, scaling, pigmented skin condition (dermatitis).

Credit: New England Journal of Medicine, 2024