Chinese woman’s beauty treatment left her with near-fatal dose of botulism
- Within days of injections into her face at clinic, 29-year-old is floored by double vision, violent headaches and vomiting
- Doctors realise botulinum toxin jabs were to blame for illness and she spent two weeks recovering in hospital
A woman from Shanghai had a near-fatal brush with botulism after being injected with a toxin as a part of a beauty treatment.
The 29-year-old from Shanghai, who goes by the alias Kuang Mei, was given botulinium toxin injections in her face at a clinic in the city this month, news portal Thepaper.cn reported.
Several days later, she found she was struggling to focus her eyes properly, suffered double vision and violent headaches and began to vomit.
Kuang sought medical help at a local hospital but was told that her eyesight was normal, while a magnetic resonance scan on her brain revealed no abnormalities. She told doctors that her voice had become hoarse and she was prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs to treat her throat.
But her poor health continued and she found it hard to swallow food and then began to suffer from fever and diarrhoea.
Doctors at various hospitals struggled to diagnose her symptoms correctly until she told medical staff at Shanghai Punan hospital about the injections she had received for her beauty treatment and they realised she was suffering from botulinum poisoning.