06.27.16
Unfortunately, it’s that time of year …
Every year, Vibrio vulnificus infections begin with the arrival of summer. When I worked with the organism, it was the lab’s take that it was fairly common in estuarine and beach waters along the Gulf Coast. Infections, catastrophic ones, happened in those with underlying medical conditions.
Upticks in V. vulnificus infections in recent years are probably attributed to more vulnerable people being in the water during summer months and possibly increased growth of the organism during the same period when conditions are especially favorable to it.
The problems started on May 12, when Kelly Kohen Blomberg was in the Gulf of Mexico near Grand Isle, a barrier island known for fishing…
[Small scratches] had turned into an oozing, gaping wound — and Blomberg had to head back to the hospital to get a skin graft and have dead tissue surgically removed. She’s now had two surgeries and there’s still a gaping hole in her foot, though doctors are hoping the skin graft will take so the wound can start healing over.
A Father’s Day celebration on the Texas Gulf Coast has left a Central Texas man, Adrian Ruiz, fighting to keep his leg after it became infected with a flesh-eating bacteria, friends and relatives said Thursday …
But on Monday afternoon, he was admitted to the intensive care unit at Seton Medical Center Hays. He was diagnosed with an infection of Vibrio vulnificus, a flesh-eating bacteria that has spread through his right leg …
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that earlier this week, 50-year-old Brian Parrott, a Houston-area man, lost part of his leg after contracting the same bacterial infection in the waters off Galveston Island.
Why it does what it does. I did that.
Every year, V. vulnificus infects and hospitalizes more people than ricin, a poison in castor seeds, has killed in the last 20 years. (Score, ricin deaths by terrorism and/or crime = ZERO; by suicide = 1.) The United States spends more money on countermeasures and vaccines for ricin than it does on V. vulnficus.
Just so you know the priorities and whose bread gets buttered.