I almost killed my family by cleaning my fish tank

Ten people and two pooches were poisoned when a man cleaning his fish tank unwittingly released fumes from the world’s “second deadliest” toxin, according to reports.

Chris Matthews, 27, was cleaning out his tank in his Oxfordshire home in England late last month — when he took out a rock covered in Pulsing Xenia coral and began scraping it, The Evening Times reported.

Agitating the coral made it release the deadly substance palytoxin into the air. After he was finished, Matthews closed the door and went to bed, according to the report.

The following day, Matthews, his girlfriend, mom, dad, sister and her boyfriend came down with flu-like symptoms, Matthews told the paper.

“It was worse than flu, we couldn’t concentrate on anything,” he told the outlet. “We couldn’t regulate our temperature — we were struggling to breathe and coughing.

“It was when we noticed our two dogs had similar symptoms that we knew something wasn’t right,” he recalled.

He called for help, sparking a massive emergency services response, including ambulances, fire crews and police, according to the report.

Four firefighters even fell ill during the response. They were hospitalized, along with Matthews and the others.

The house was ventilated overnight, while chemical officers and public health officials worked to remove the rest of the coral.

Dr. Mike Leahy, a virologist featured on the National Geographic TV show “Bite Me,” lives in the town where the incident occurred, and tweeted a photo of the emergency response.

“The strangest thing for me is I’ve been all over the world, and then I come back home and this happens in an Oxfordshire village,” Leahy told The Mirror. “Palytoxin is the second deadliest poison in the world, one gram can kill 80 people, though it has to be ingested to be lethal.”

Matthews, who has kept tropical fish for 12 years, told The Evening Times he had no idea that he had released the poisonous substance.

“If we had spent another night in that bedroom our lives would have been in danger,” he said. “Certainly our dogs would have been in a very bad way, according to the vet…. That is what is so worrying, what if there had been a young child or someone elderly in the house?”

Experts consider “botulinum toxin” a protein produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum — and used to make skin-tightener Botox — as the world’s deadliest toxin.

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