Yuli Vargas is 27 years old and her life changed completely in August 2025, when after consuming spoiled sushi at a restaurant she suffered a foodborne infection that led to salmonella and typhoid fever, and that infection triggered a serious medical crisis that led her to face pancreatitis, gallbladder surgery, and a stroke, all within a matter of weeks.
The young woman, who was a model and worked in a family business managing social media, creating content, and making payments to suppliers, lived a very active life between being a mom, working, and exercising, but since that date she says that nothing was ever the same again because her health was completely affected and began to spiral downward while pain took over her body without doctors being able to find a clear cause.
It was then that specialists diagnosed her with systemic lupus erythematosus, an autoimmune disease in which the immune system, which is supposed to protect the body, becomes altered and begins to mistakenly attack its own cells and tissues, a condition that doctors linked to the sushi infection she had suffered weeks earlier.
