SF ghost-pepper burger yields 1-inch esophagus tear

A 47-year-old man engaged in a daredevil eating contest in San Francisco found out the hard way just how hot a ghost pepper can be when he munched into a burger topped with a puree made out of the legendary chile.

The ordeal, while rare, was documented by UCSF physicians in a case study published recently in the Journal of Emergency Medicine that highlights the potential danger of extreme eating.

On the Scoville scale — a heat index designed to measure the levels of capsaicin in peppers that make them so spicy — ghost peppers weigh in at 1 million units, or super-hot territory.

A jalapeño by comparison clocks in between 5,000 and 8,000 Scoville units, while the world’s hottest pepper, a cross-breeding feat of spicy engineering, measures about 1.5 million.

The restaurant where the hospitalized man got sick was also left unnamed by UCSF, but the contest was part of a trend of people consuming hotter and hotter substances in an effort to outdo one another.

People brave or foolish enough to chew and swallow the super-hot peppers are featured in food-dare YouTube videos.

The ghost pepper itself — which is spicy but not acidic — couldn’t alone have caused the one-inch tear in the man’s esophagus, Smollin said.

The man was released from the hospital 23 days later with a gastric tube, UCSF said, after undergoing extensive surgery to repair his throat.

Jasmine Robinson, a manager at San Francisco’s Hot Licks, a chain that specializes in spicy products, said she’d be “surprised” if the man wasn’t required to sign a waiver for the challenge.