And the award for Most Unlikely Domestic Threat goes to the avocado.
If you have not yet encountered the “Avocado Hand”, count yourself lucky.
The phenomenon has been grabbing headlines in the US and UK recently after a considerable number of people, including Meryl Streep unwittingly ended in A&E having accidentally cut themselves as the “superfood” resisted our brutal efforts to make of it some guacamole.
Now, the “Avocado Hand” has arrived in Ireland following the publication of a study on the injury in the Irish Medical Journal.
The paper, titled ‘The Avocado Hand’ has revealed that a 32-year-old Irish woman sustained a serious hand injury while cutting an avocado and had to visit Beaumont Hospital’s Emergency Department as a direct result.
“The injury was sustained while she was preparing an avocado”, the paper says. “On arrival to the EC, the knife was still impaled through [the] patient’s finger as well as the avocado.”
Causing damage to her nerve, she was given a regional anaesthetic while the wound was washed out. Once the nerve was repaired, she was discharged on the same day.
According to the paper, “There has been an apparent increase in avocado related hand injuries. Classically, the patients hold the avocado in their non-dominant hand while using a knife to cut/peel the fruit with their dominant hand. The mechanism of injury is usually a stabbing injury to the non-dominant hand as the knife slips past the stone, through the soft avocado fruit.”
However, the authors noted that despite the increase in “avocado hand”, there was no medical documentation on the phenomenon prior to its publication.
It went on to say that consumption of the apparently-now deadly “superfood” has risen in the US from 2 avocados per capita in 2002 to 7 in 2016, while related hand injuries have risen too in this period.
Since this is now a thing, Simon Eccles, secretary of the British Association of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery suggested in a UK Times article that labels should be put on avocados to warn people of this silent threat.
“People do not anticipate that the avocados they buy can be very ripe and there is minimal understanding of how to handle them”, Eccles said. “We don’t want to put people off the fruit but I think warning labels are an effective way of dealing with this. It needs to be recognisable. Perhaps we could have a cartoon picture of an avocado with a knife, and a big red cross going through it?”
In his quest to convince people that fruits, such as the avocado are still of some benefit, Jamie Oliver has even gone as far as to demonstrate the safest way of chopping humankind’s newest threat at this point in our evolution.
The alternative (and definitely more practical) solution has been to grow avocados without a stone, with M&S recently having launched this enhanced version of the fruit.
So, as the “avocado hand” looms over Ireland, these are your options: learn to use a knife or figure out a way to grow stoneless fruits by locating unpollinated avocado blossoms.
Good luck.
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