A British man died after contracting a rare flesh-eating virus while swimming in the sea.
Phillip Maile was holidaying with his wife, Vanessa, in Turkey back in September 2022 when he ‘grazed’ his leg on a piece of wood.

The pair were out on a day trip when they began walking to a nearby waterfall. As the dad took to a set of wooden stairs to the viewing platform, his foot suddenly plummeted through one of the rotten planks. While he was unharmed, he had a small cut on his left leg.

“He got this little scratch which was tiny. It looked like a graze. That’s the best way to describe it,” said daughter Charlotte. Dressing his wound in a waterproof bandage and being told the salt water would be ‘beneficial’, the 65-year-old carried on swimming in the Mediterranean. But he soon started complaining of pain and his leg quickly turned black and blue.

“Despite the waterproof dressing the seawater obviously got in, but we didn’t know this at the time,” said Charlotte. Phillip was soon taken to hospital where at first, doctors were unable to put a finger on just why he was in so much pain but his daughter said you could ‘almost see how quickly it was travelling’.

Turns out the dad from Worthing had contracted a deadly skin infection called necrotising fasciitis after a rare type of bacteria, Vibrio vulnificus, got into his wound. Also dubbed the ‘flesh-eating bacteria’, it causes flesh around an open wound to die. In the hope of stopping the infection from spreading, doctors raced to clean and remove the dead or infected skin, a procedure known as debridement. Unfortunately, this failed and on 14 September and Philip was transferred to the intensive care unit after developing sepsis.

His family was then pulled into making a decision and that evening, Phillip’s leg above the knee was amputated and he was placed on life support. Sadly, he then suffered a septic shock and had to be placed on dialysis but his daughter said there was still some hope.

“They thought that had done it and we had a couple of days where we thought this is going in the right direction because even though he was intubated there was no necrotic smell,” said Charlotte.
However, on 20 September, doctors removed his bandages and found signs of necrosis so they suggested amputating the rest of his leg. But again, this failed to prevent the deadly bacteria from spreading and after fighting for three more weeks, Phillip died on 13 October 2022.

Charlotte and her family found support from the Lee Spark NF Foundation and the daughter now plans to run the Abingdon marathon in October, already raising over £2,500 on GoFundMe. “Honestly, the foundation helped us in our darkest, darkest time where we thought we were entirely on our own,” she said.