For nearly a week, emergency doctors in Nagasaki, Japan, believed an 88-year-old woman was fighting septic shock from pneumonia and an intestinal infection. The explanation they eventually settled on was sitting in her kitchen: an opened bottle of orange-scented dishwashing detergent, stored in the refrigerator with about half of its contents gone.
The woman, who lived alone and had severe dementia, could not tell doctors what she had swallowed. Her family made the discovery on her sixth day in the hospital, according to a case report in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care published in April 2026 by emergency and critical care physicians from Nagasaki University Hospital and Nagasaki Harbor Medical Center.
