Japan: Giant Centipede Bite Blamed for a Flesh-Eating Death [NSFL]

A man ends up dead from necrotizing fasciitis, the infection that eats through tissue faster than doctors can keep up with, after what’s being blamed on a bite from one of the region’s biggest centipedes. The photo evidence is a bug laid out on a ruler and two very ugly shoulder wounds, and the thread spent more time arguing about where this actually happened than about the bug itself.

Images

Photo one is just the specimen: a long, dark, many-legged centipede laid out next to a metal ruler, measuring somewhere around 8 or 9 cm. The post calls it a Taiwan giant centipede and says it’s the country’s biggest species, a claim several readers jumped on right away. Then it cuts to hospital shots: a shirtless man on a bed with an oxygen tube under his nose, ECG pads and a blood pressure cuff strapped on, his face blurred out.

Both sides of his upper chest, right by the shoulders, have gone black and necrotic, raw tissue showing through swollen, discolored skin, and the close-up only makes it look worse. Whatever did that, it worked fast.

What the Thread Said

Turns out the thread had the same hunch as everyone reading along: half of it insisted this wasn’t Japan at all, throwing out guesses from Taiwan to a university hospital in Turkey. The other half wasn’t even sold on the centipede, betting on a secondary infection setting into the wound, or plain undiagnosed diabetes, as the real culprit. “A bite doing that to a grown man? Sounds like something else got into the wound after,” one reader wrote. A smaller crowd skipped the autopsy debate entirely and just compared centipede stories, a couple of guys swearing the ones that drop on you from the ceiling back home are way bigger than this.

Centipede Bites Rarely Kill, But What They Can Trigger Is Another Story

The clip shows a death blamed on necrotizing fasciitis after a centipede bite, but Japan has never confirmed a death from the bite itself.

• No confirmed case of a centipede bite alone killing anyone in Japan
• Only about 1% of bites cause anaphylaxis; in a 2001 study of 375 cases, 5 went into shock and 3 needed hospital care
• Bites peak in May, and getting hit on the head or neck raises the shock risk
• Bees and wasps kill about 17 people a year in Japan, versus 2 a year from bears
• Mamushi viper bites run 1,000 to 2,000 a year with a 0.8% fatality rate

TOXIC SAMURAI HOME