Houston girl, 17, is treated for rotting skin after 'taking flesh-eating drug Krokodil' in Mexico

The presence of flesh-eating drug Krokodil has been confirmed in western Mexico as authorities announced that a Houston-based teen was treated for the side effects of the ‘poor man’s heroin’ while on a trip south of the border.

Doctors first thought that the 17-year-old was suffering from a sexually transmitted disease because the street drug had ruined her genitals.

'It wasn't sexually transmitted. She said she'd been using Krokodil for the last two months,' José Sotero Ruiz Hernández of Mexico's National Institute of Migration told local paper El Periodico Correo.

'The young woman who used this drug had an infection that had rotted her genitals.'

The victim has not been named and her status is unknown as she never returned to the clinic for a second check in.

The head of the council on addictions in the western state of Jalisco, Dr. Enrico Sotelo, said young woman is a resident of Houston, Texas and not Mexico.

She came to Mexico to visit the Pacific coast resort city of Puerto Vallarta where she has relatives, in November.

Soon after, she checked into a local health clinic for digestive problems, and it was there that doctors detected the flesh lesions.

Dr Sotelo, who did not reveal the patient's name in accordance with privacy guidelines, said she told authorities she used the drug in Houston.

'She acquired this problem with Krokodil in Houston, not here in Puerto Vallarta,' said Sotelo, who in any case has implemented an educational program to warn about the drug's ill effects.

Sotelo said a survey of rehab centers and clinics in Jalisco had revealed there were no other local cases.

He said so far, Mexico has detected only two probable cases, the woman in Puerto Vallarta and another person in the border state of Baja California. Diagnosis is usually based on the tell-tale lesions, because the body quickly metabolizes the drug's psychoactive agent, desomorphine.

The drug was dubbed 'krokodil' in Russia because of greenish, scaly skin lesions addicts develop, giving them the appearance of having crocodile skin.

A home-brewed heroin substitute popular in Russia, Krokodil is often concocted by cooking the prescription painkiller codeine along with gasoline, iodine, phosphorus and other chemicals.