SAN SALVADOR — February 13, 2014 — A fisherman who says he drifted at sea for more than a year, surviving on raw fish, turtles, and birds, is in stunningly good health but psychologically fragile, medical experts said Wednesday as the man recuperated in a hospital in his native El Salvador.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga underwent a battery of tests after returning home from the Marshall Islands, where he showed up after what he has described as 6,500-mile journey from Mexico across the Pacific that began when his small fishing boat was thrown off course by bad weather.
The medical team that examined him at the San Rafael hospital in the Salvadoran capital said he was in remarkably good physical health: with no skin lesions from overexposure to the sun, and no cardiovascular or kidney issues. His only physical problem, doctors, was a case of anemia.
‘‘All of the exams have been basically close to normal. It’s incredible,’’ said El Salvador’s minister of public health, Maria Isabel Rodriguez.
She and other Salvadoran experts who looked at Alvarenga’s results said they had no doubt about the veracity of his tale, so incredible that it left many skeptical even in the absence of an alternate explanation for his appearance on the Pacific Island atoll.