A woman had a holiday from hell after her skin peeled off and her hair and nails fell off when she was bitten by a tiger mosquito in the Caribbean.
Amy Wells, 37, got a huge rash over her whole body after the bite and was treated with antibiotics - which reacted with a medicine she was already taking.
She had to take ten weeks off work and has been left with scars all over her lower legs.
Amy Wells, 37, got a huge rash over her whole body after the bite and was treated with antibiotics - which reacted with a medicine she was already taking.
She had to take ten weeks off work and has been left with scars all over her lower legs.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I went on holiday January 2023 to the Dominican Republic for 10 days. I believe a tiger mosquito
00:11bit me. The initial rash that I developed started on my neck, made its way all the way
00:18down my body, all across my arms. It looked like heat rash to start with. It then expanded
00:26to increase across my body. Although I was wearing mosquito repellent, I was still being
00:31bitten. We went to the hospital in the Dominican Republic and there was a language barrier.
00:38It was missed out that I'd been on amoxicillin for tooth infection. I was then given ceftriaxone,
00:45which is an antibiotic, and that then caused the reaction with the amoxicillin. I'd stopped
00:51taking the amoxicillin three days into the holiday, that's when it had ended, but it
00:55was still in my system. Flew home and when we landed, my skin was burning and my legs
01:03had started to swell. We went to Favreau Emergent Treatment Centre, who took one look at me
01:10and said, no, you've got to go to A&E. And within a couple of hours of being at A&E,
01:14the blisters had moved all the way down my arms, across my belly and across my chest
01:19at this point, and the rash had moved onto my legs. I have to say, it was probably the
01:25scariest moment is when you realise that they don't know what it is, because it was so rare,
01:33it was so uncommon. I got asked if I'd been burnt, if I'd had acid thrown on me, and it
01:38was only when the junior doctors looked at my legs and could see the puncture wounds.
01:44With the medical history of the Dominican Republic, I decided that actually it was an
01:50adverse reaction to a mosquito bite. I started noticing that my hair was falling out. By May,
01:57I was going completely bald on top. Luckily, it has grown back. My nails and my toenails
02:03also fell off. Losing my hair was one of the hardest out of the whole illness,
02:07I think, because it is what identifies you.