Necrotizing Fasciitis - Notable Cases

Notable Cases

• 1994 Lucien Bouchard, former premier of Québec, Canada, who became infected in 1994 while leader of the federal official opposition Bloc Québécois party, lost a leg to the illness.
• 1997 Jeff Moorad, former agent and partial owner of the San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks, contracted the disease in 1997. He had seven surgeries in a little more than a week but later recovered fully.
• 2004 Eric Allin Cornell, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, lost his left arm and shoulder to the disease in 2004.
• 2004 Jan Peter Balkenende, former Prime Minister of the Netherlands was infected in 2004. He was in the hospital for several weeks but recovered fully.
• 2005 Alexandru Marin, an experimental particle physicist, professor at MIT, Boston University and Harvard University, and researcher at CERN and JINR, died from the disease in 2005.
• 2006 David Walton, a leading economist in the UK and a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, which is responsible for setting interest rates, died in June 2006 of the disease within 24 hours of diagnosis.
• 2006 Alan Coren, British writer and satirist, announced in his Christmas 2006 column for The Times that his long absence as a columnist had been due to contracting the disease while on holiday in France.
• 2009 R. W. Johnson, South African journalist and historian, contracted the disease in March 2009 after injuring his foot while swimming. His leg was amputated above the knee.
• 2011 Jeff Hanneman, guitarist for the thrash-metal band Slayer, contracted the disease in early 2011, allegedly after being bitten by a spider.
• 2011 Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction author, contracted the disease in early 2011. On his blog, Watts reported, "I’m told I was a few hours away from being dead.... If there was ever a disease fit for a science fiction writer, flesh-eating disease has got to be it. This...spread across my leg as fast as a Star Trek space disease in time-lapse."