‘Flesh-Eating’ Vulva Infections Are on the Rise

The British Medical Journal recently published a frightening report: three women showed up at the same UK hospital with necrotizing fasciitis, a bacterial infection that destroys soft tissue. In this case, the infection was localized around the vulva. One of the women died.

While vulvar necrotizing fasciitis is rare, doctors at Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust are seeing it crop up more often, and it’s started to make some appearances in the United States.

Necrotizing fasciitis is commonly referred to as a “flesh-eating bacteria,” even though it’s not actually eating away at flesh as much as kind of just killing the soft tissue cells, turning the infected areas into painful shades of red, purple, and black, along with severe pain and swelling.

One woman noticed a spot near her mons pubis. She was prescribed antibiotics to take care of it. Five days later, her infection had spread across her labia, abdomen, and hip. She died of sepsis less than 28 hours after being diagnosed, even after surgery to remove the necrotic tissue. The other two women survived, but not without multiple surgeries and, in one case, reconstruction.

The hospital treated 20 such cases from 2022 to 2024—that’s more than the entire previous decade. Here in the US, the CDC is also sounding the alarm: rates of invasive group A Streptococcus (the bacterial culprit in question) doubled in the U.S. between 2013 and 2022. Europe’s seeing a rise too.

Necrotizing fasciitis can kill quickly if untreated, and that’s especially true for vulvar necrotizing fasciitis, which has a mortality rate of 50 percent. If something in your genital area hurts, looks swollen, or otherwise looks like it should not be there, don’t wait to get it checked out. Early detection is the only way to stay alive if you are indeed infected.