A little girl in the US who loved to dance lost her leg after a common throat infection developed into a dangerous ‘flesh-eating’ bug, reports The Independent.
Tessa Puma, a six-year-old from the mid-western US state of Ohio, was taking antibiotics after being diagnosed with strep throat, a bacterial infection of the back of the throat and tonsils. But after she also caught the flu and began to complain of pain in her limbs, her parents took her to two hospitals where doctors spotted the rare but potentially life-threatening complication.
Doctors said bacteria from her sore throat had travelled through her bloodstream to the tissues in her legs, resulting in necrotising fasciitis – a tissue infection that can spread quickly and lead to further complications such as sepsis, which can cause organ failure and death.
“She spent a couple of days in the hospital, and her leg got worse and worse,” Tessa’s father Matt Puma is quoted in the report as saying
Necrotising fasciitis is sometimes called ‘flesh-eating’ as it causes tissues under the skin and around the muscles to die. This tissue damage is in fact caused by the release of toxins.
As Tessa’s state worsened, causing her severe pain, doctors decided to operate to relieve swelling, reports said. They discovered the infection had already caused extensive damage in her left leg, and when they could not find a pulse due to the amount of dead tissue, they decided to amputate the limb from the knee down.
The report says Tessa is currently recovering in a children’s hospital, where she will have further surgery on her leg to help her survive. “Tessa's surgery tomorrow is at noon, it is just to fix her leg to get it ready for her prosthetic down the road,” her mother Tina Puma wrote on Facebook. “Skin grafting will start when she is feeling better and off the ventilators.”
[link url="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/girl-six-year-old-loses-leg-sore-throat-tessa-puma-dancer-ohio-flesh-eating-infection-a7667636.html"]The Independent report[/link]