If Margaritaville were a real place, it should definitely keep a few dermatologists on hand.
In a case of an oft-overlooked food preparation risk, a 40-year-old man showed up to an allergy clinic in Texas with a severe, burning rash on both his hands that had developed two days earlier. A couple of days later, it blistered. And a few weeks after that, the skin darkened and scaled. After several months, the skin on his hands finally returned to normal.
The culprit: lime juice and sunlight.
It turns out that just before developing the nasty skin eruption, the man had manually squeezed a dozen limes, then headed to an outdoor soccer game without applying sunscreen. His doctors diagnosed the man's rash as a classic case of phytophotodermatitis, according to a case report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The condition is caused by toxic substances found in plants (phyto) that react with UV light (photo) to cause a burning, blistering, scaling, pigmented skin condition (dermatitis).