A bite of a popular Japanese snack turned into a life-threatening emergency for a 79-year-old man. While eating lunch, he accidentally inhaled a piece of cheese-filled kamaboko, a Japanese fish cake, and developed acute respiratory failure. Doctors put him on a breathing tube, then used a probe cold enough to freeze onto the food so they could pull it out of his airway.
The case was published in the September 2026 issue of Respirology Case Reports by a team of 13 authors from the Department of Respiratory Medicine at the National Hospital Organization (NHO) Okayama Medical Center in Okayama, Japan. In the title of their report, the authors describe the procedure as life-saving.
