Widow Says Husband Contracted Scabies in Hospital Weeks Before His Death

A widow has spoken of her distress after her husband of more than four decades contracted scabies while being treated in hospital, a complication she believes cast a shadow over the final weeks of his life and may have contributed to his death.

Kate Baxter said her husband Paul, who was 90 when he died in June, caught the highly contagious skin infestation at Glangwili Hospital in Carmarthen. He had been admitted following a stroke in December 2025, and the scabies was not diagnosed until May — a delay his wife says left him suffering unnecessarily in his last days.

Paul died on 8 June. Crusted scabies, a severe form of the condition, is recorded as a secondary cause of death on his death certificate. According to Kate, he had also developed pneumonia, and she believes the infestation weakened his immune system to the point where he could no longer fight off the infection.

Scabies is caused by microscopic mites that burrow beneath the skin, and it spreads through close physical contact. The crusted form of the disease is particularly serious: those affected can carry as many as two million mites and eggs on their bodies, making them highly infectious to others around them. The condition is a persistent problem in healthcare settings, where patients are often elderly, frail, and in close proximity to one another.

Kate has described how the illness changed the nature of her visits to her dying husband. Because of the risk of transmission, she was required to wear protective equipment similar to that used by medical staff during the Covid pandemic. The most painful consequence, she said, was being unable to hold his hand without wearing rubber gloves.

"To have him die like that wasn't good," she said, recalling how Paul complained that his back itched and how his skin came away "like sand" when she rubbed it. She said holding somebody's hand with gloves on is simply not the same as offering genuine physical comfort, and that the protective measures removed a degree of intimacy from their final moments together.

Kate also contracted scabies from her husband and described the experience as dreadful. She said the itching is relentless and impossible to relieve, the skin is constantly painful, and the symptoms worsen at night, when the mites are most active. She described sudden sharp, stabbing pains in her legs or back that seemed to multiply across her body, calling the whole experience distressing.

The path to diagnosis was long. By February, Paul had told his wife he was feeling itchy, but she said doctors initially thought the problem might be an allergic reaction to medication. It was 12 weeks and six days before he was formally diagnosed in May, by which point the condition had progressed to the more severe crusted form. Kate believes doctors should have realised sooner that they were dealing with something more than a simple skin complaint.

Kate said that before he was admitted to hospital, Paul was a bright and funny man with an inquiring mind, even at the age of 90. She described him as great company and someone who enjoyed life. The contrast between that vitality and the manner of his final weeks is central to her sense of loss.

She also said the undertaker told her that Paul's body carried a tag describing him as an "environmental hazard" while it was in the morgue, because the scabies was still active on him after death. She said no one expects their husband to go into hospital with one condition and leave through the morgue classified as a health hazard.

After Paul's death, Kate wrote to Hywel Dda health board to complain about how long it took to diagnose the scabies. The board's chief executive, Phil Kloer, replied that no evidence had been found that concerns about the rash were ignored or that there was a failure to seek an appropriate medical review. He added that the health board was unable to determine with certainty whether the rash could have been prevented.

Kate said she was unhappy with that response and felt the health board had skated over the issues she raised. She maintains that doctors should have recognised much sooner that they were not dealing with an ordinary skin condition given how long the symptoms persisted without improvement.

The case comes amid a wider outbreak of scabies affecting hospitals in the Hywel Dda region. In July, the Steffan ward at Glangwili Hospital was closed in order to treat an outbreak, and the Cadog ward was closed in September. Both have since reopened. The Teifi ward has remained closed since 21 September.

This week, the health board also closed two wards at Prince Philip Hospital in Llanelli because of scabies. The board confirmed that some treatments had been cancelled as a result of the ward closures, and said anyone affected would be contacted proactively as soon as it became clear that a scheduled appointment might need to be changed.

Ardiana Gjini, the board's director of public health, said officials were working in partnership with other agencies, including Public Health Wales, to bring the outbreaks under control. The board has said it is taking extra measures to limit the spread of scabies and is focused on keeping hospitals and healthcare settings as clean as possible.

The scale of the problem appears to be growing across Wales. The most recently published data shows there were more than 27,000 reported consultations for scabies through the Common Ailments Service last year, compared with 4,810 two years earlier — a striking increase that suggests the condition is spreading well beyond hospital wards and into the wider community.

For Kate, those figures are not abstract. She believes that had her husband not caught scabies, his immune system might not have been compromised, and he might have been able to fight off the pneumonia that ultimately contributed to his death. She is left with the conviction that the infection took away the quality of the time the couple had left together, and with the hope that lessons will be learned so that other families do not endure the same experience.