Woman's extreme allergic reaction to mosquito bite on holiday in the Caribbean

A woman who was bitten by a tiger mosquito in the Caribbean described her rare allergic reaction as ‘hell on earth’ - after her whole body blistered and she lost her hair and nails.

Looked like she was ‘in a fire’

Amy Wells, 37, was treated with antibiotics - but they reacted with a medicine she was already taking and within days her blisters became so severe that she looked like she’d been ‘in a fire’.

She had to take ten weeks off work, after the rare illness left her in ‘extreme’ pain and losing her hair, as she shows in the video above (click to play).

Painful rash

Amy, from Ashford, Kent, who works in quality control, said: "The blisters covered my whole body - even my eyes and my lips. People kept asking me if I'd been in a fire.”

Rare reaction to medicine

Amy had travelled to the Dominican Republic on January 22 2023, where she developed the rash. As she explains in the video, Amy was given an antibiotic called ceftriaxone not commonly used in the UK. A language barrier meant they didn't talk about how she was taking amoxicillin for a tooth infection.

On her ten-hour flight home, her thighs swelled to twice their normal size and it felt like they were burning ‘from the inside out’.

Tiger mosquito bites

Doctors spotted puncture wounds on Amy's legs which they identified as mosquito bites, she said. Amy believes she was bitten by tiger mosquitos, which carry dengue fever and Zika virus. She thinks an infection from the bites caused the first rash.

Medics said the burning was caused by a rare reaction between the two antibiotics, she says. Amy's finger and toe nails fell out in April, and her hair started thinning, and by May she was totally bald - which a hair specialist said was likely ‘due to shock’.