Doctors soon discovered that they were infected with the rare soil bacterium, which causes a disease called melioidosis.
Dangerous infection
In general, melioidosis is difficult to diagnose and difficult to treat, because it is naturally resistant to some antibiotics. It can infect people if they get breathing in or in open cuts. Sometimes the infection can remain located, such as a lung infection or a skin ulcer. But it can also come into the blood and become a systemic infection, spread to different organs, including the brain. Fatality percentages can be as high as 90 percent in people who are not treated, but fall to less than 40 percent in people who receive fast, correct care.
Both men in 2024 were quickly admitted to hospital and diagnosed with Sepsis. Both were treated with heavy antibioticgimes and recovered, although the patient 2 declined in November, so that a stay in the hospital was needed. He eventually recovered again.
According to the CDC, on average about a dozen melioidosis -cases are identified in the US, but most occur in people who have traveled to areas known to accommodate the bacteria. None of the men infected last year had recently traveled to such places. So the researchers turned to genetic sequencing, who revealed the link to two cases in the 1980s.
In those cases, both men died of the infection. The man named Patient 3 died in October 1989. He was a veteran who fluid in Vietnam – where the bacterium is endemic – two decades prior to his infection. The researchers note that such a long latency period for one B. Pseudomallei Infection is not completely excluded, but it would be rare to have such a big gap between exposure and an infection. More suspicious, the researchers note that in the month prior to the death of the patient, 3 hugo hugo in Georgia landed as a storm of category 4 and three to five centimeters of rain.
