I will name my fugu "fatty". He will be my fatty fugu. I'll kiss him and love him and squeeze him and hug him and... er, wait, why's my lip and tongue numb. I've lost all feeling in my upper torso. It's really hard to breathe.

Bye, bye.

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While the strength of the tetrodotoxin in fugu is absolutely NOT exaggerated, the actual danger involved in eating fugu that has been prepared by a licensed chef is quite remote.

Acquiring a license to prepare fugu is an intensive 2-3 year affair, culminating with EXTREMELY strict testing. The CDC states that there are approximately 50 deaths per year in Japan from fugu poisoning. Compare this with the number of deaths for any other type of food poisoning, and you're talking about a tiny, tiny number. What's more, I believe those numbers typically include those who (unwisely) attempt to prepare fugu themselves at home.

An acquaintance once told me that anybody who would eat fugu when it could kill them was clearly an idiot. I responded, "Okay... let's say you're on a driving trip, on the interstate. You're hungry, so you pull off. You realize that the only restaurant nearby serves fugu and only fugu. You say, heck with that, I'm not eating that stuff. So you drive 10 miles on a perpendicular state highway to get to the nearest McDonald's, have yourself a Big Mac, and drive back to the interstate to continue your trip. Your odds of dying from food poisoning from the Big Mac or the extra 20 mile drive are probably greater than your odds of dying if you stay put and eat the fugu."

I'd actually love to crunch the numbers on this. The highway safety numbers are easy enough to come by, and the number of tetrodotoxin poisoning cases are easy to get at, but estimated yearly fugu dishes served is the elusive number.

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Found some numbers :-)

Estimates on fugu consumed in Japan annually range from 10,000 to 20,000 tons. So, to give the most conservative odds, let's say there are 100 deaths per year (the upper end of reported numbers), that those deaths are from only 10,000 tons, and that a serving of fugu is half a pound. Quick napkin calculation reveals a 1 in 400,000 chance of being offed by your fugu, though if you use the numbers on the other end of the spectrum (20,000 tons, 50 fatalities, 4 oz. serving), you're talking 1 in 3.2 million.


Traffic fatalities in the US in 2004 were reported at 1.46 per 100,000,000 vehicle miles by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, which works out to a roughly 1 in 68.5 million chance of dying for every mile driven... or a 1 in 3.42 million chance of dying in the 20 mile drive outlined above.

Very, very rough napkin calculations, here. But bottom line, if it's located across town, the drive to the restaurant is still probably more dangerous than the dinner itself.

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If you are poisoned by fugu, it's not permanent so long as someone keeps doing CPR on you until the poison wears off. Fugu's poison is the same form as found in poison dart tree frogs; it paralyzes your diaphram, but wears off. You remain conscious as you get paralyzed, watching and hearing people pull a white sheet over your face declaring you dead as you suffocate, thinking "No! I'm not dead! Help me!"It's especially tragic because it's an unneccessary death: the poison wears off, but not before your brain dies of the lack of oxygen. The only rememdy is rather simple: put the person under a respirator until the poison wears off in an hour or two.

Now you know. Have a designated non-fugu eater along when you go, and make sure he/she knows exactly what to do.

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