The liver, at home
Japan's food-poisoning series for pufferfish shows zero or one death a year. In 2025 the table shows incidents, patients, and no deaths.
Fugu is a licensed kitchen in Japan and a folk story everywhere else. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare publishes the food-poisoning series, including pufferfish, with incidents, patients and deaths. Across the recent decade the deaths are zero or one in a year. The table updated in 2026 for Reiwa 7, the year 2025, shows 10 incidents, 15 patients and no deaths. The card ticks 1, which is the size of a year in which someone dies, and the second line is that zero.
What the series is actually describing
The dangerous cases are mostly people cooking a fish they caught, or eating the liver or the ovary, outside the licence system. A restaurant working inside the rules is not where the series puts the deaths. The poison is tetrodotoxin. The dose that kills is small, which is why a handful of patients can include a death, and why a year can also pass with patients and no death.
This is Japan. Other countries have pufferfish poisonings that this ministry table does not include. The card says Japan for that reason. Treating a Japanese regulatory series as a world rate would be the same error as the old lift card.
Beside the poison counter, and beside the myth
Poisonous Toxins, at 60,000 a year, is the world line for accidental swallowing or inhalation. A Japanese fugu death sits inside that idea and is invisible inside that number. The rare card exists so the sliver can be seen. It should not be added to the 60,000.
Spontaneous human combustion, the other card at about one a year, is a storytelling rate. Forensic investigators do not accept it as a cause. Pufferfish is the contrast, kept on purpose: one of these ones is a ministry table, and the other is a story. The sorting is in How rare is a rare death?.