‘Baloney’: Doctors Debunk Story Linking Amputations To Leftovers

BOSTON, MA — One of the doctors involved in a case discussion about a 19-year-old New England teen who underwent multiple amputations because of meningoccal disease is pushing back against widely published reports the patient became ill after eating bad leftovers.

The story was published by multiple outlets, including Forbes, USA Today, Patch and others, after a fictional dramatization on YouTube brought new attention to a case challenge published in the New England Journal of Medicine last spring.

The YouTuber responsible, whose username is Chubbyemu, tied the teen’s illness to a leftover chicken, rice and lo mein meal — incorrectly so, according to the editor of the article, Dr. Eric Rosenberg, the director of the clinical microbiology laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, where the teen was treated.

He told The Boston Globe that what the patient ate was “completely irrelevant” and that it “was horrifying that this is how medical disinformation can be so easily disseminated.”

“There’s absolutely no history in the medical literature of this kind of bacteria being transmitted by food,” Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, told The Globe. “It’s baloney.”

» For the complete story, go to The Boston Globe