Haff disease is a syndrome of painful muscle stiffness and rhabdomyolysis, often accompanied by myoglobinuria, following the consumption of cooked freshwater and brackish water fish.
Since Haff disease is characterized by vomiting and myalgia without fever following mean incubation periods of 8 hours, a heat-stable toxin has always been suspected as the cause.
Internet search engines including Pub Med, Medline, Ovid, Google[R], and Google Scholar[R] were queried with the key words, "Haff disease, seafood poisoning, and rhabdomyolysis", in order to identify all reports of Haff disease in the US with the first two cases reported in 1984 and the last two cases reported in 2014.
Haff disease, first reported along the Baltic coast in 1924, is unexplained rhabdomyolysis in a person who ate fish in the 24 hours before onset of illness (1).
Outbreaks of Haff disease have never been reported in Brazil.
A third report concerned
Haff disease, which has a case-fatality rate of 1% (9).
Haff disease is a syndrome of unexplained rhabdomyolysis following consumption of certain types of fish, it is caused by an unidentified toxin.
Editorial Note During the 1920s, the name "Haff disease" was given to an illness characterized by severe muscle pain and stiffness that affected approximately 1000 persons living along the Koenigsberg Haff, a brackish inlet of the Baltic Sea (1).
Haff disease, identified in Europe in 1924, is unexplained rhabdomyolysis in a person who ate fish in the 24 hours before onset of illness.
Among these was arsenic poisoning (4), which is still cited in modern medical dictionaries as the cause of Haff disease (5).
