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Tattoo ink can cause a serious illness
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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An outbreak of a rare bacterial skin infection in upstate New York in 2011, caused by a tainted batch of ink, was the first warning sign that tattooing is a dangerous and largely unregulated activity.
Body art enthusiasts have fallen victim to the Mycobacterium haemophilum bacteria, which belongs to the family of bacteria that causes leprosy and tuberculosis.
Scientists spent a month to figure out where this infection came from and what kind of infection it was. If the treatment is chosen correctly, then recovery will still take many months.
In addition to the incidents in New York, experts have identified cases of infection in other cities – Iowa, Colorado and Washington.
Microbacteria are the cause of both a minor rash and a more dangerous form of the disease, including severe abscesses that require surgical intervention.
Experts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration are calling for tighter controls on regulations governing tattoos.
In addition, experts intend to test the technology for producing tattoo inks at the factories where they are manufactured.
"We believe that tattoos can be very dangerous and cause great harm to a person, because there is still no law that would standardize the composition of ink," say scientists. "In medical practice, there have even been cases where people died after decorating their bodies with body art."
According to experts, the cause of contamination of the ink, and subsequently of the person, could have been ordinary tap water, which is used to dilute the ink.
According to statistics, Americans spend about $1.65 billion on body decoration with tattoos every year. There are 21,000 tattoo parlors in fifty states, so applying body art is not a problem, it only puts the health of the fan at risk.
The average cost of a small tattoo is $45.
According to surveys, 29% of US residents believe that tattoos give them a rebellious spirit, 31% admitted that they want to look sexier this way, and 5% painted their bodies to demonstrate to others their content, inner fulfillment and intelligence.