You Probably Don’t Need To Worry About Flesh-eating Bacteria

As ocean temps rise, it will spread with those warming waters to new ocean habitats where colder waters previously kept it in balance. We’ve seen outbreaks of disease from similar types of Vibrio related to increasing ocean temps as significantly north as Alaska. Most cases of the disease take place between May and October, when coastal waters are warmest.

This could change, however, as summertime weather longer starts earlier and will last. I am an infectious disease epidemiologist thinking about tracking disease, investigating outbreaks and food safety. News reports have a tendency to focus on people dying or shedding limbs from the “flesh-eating” bacteria. It isn’t front-page information when someone has a moderate skin contamination or eats a negative oyster and spends a couple days in the bathroom. We don’t often identify the most moderate health problems because people typically don’t seek health care on their behalf.

  • Garnier Light Day Cream
  • Using Too Much Product
  • Note pores and skin and feel heat of the skin
  • Colour combinations
  • One (1) Point Guard

Even so, V. vulnificus infections are rare. Each year The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quotes that about 205 attacks occur, of which 124 were reported in 2014, including 21 deaths. To place this in a little perspective, over 32, that is in automobile crashes 000 people died. Most cases have a tendency to be males over 40 years of age and nearly all of them involve some type of underlying chronic health condition, such as liver or kidney disease, diabetes or alcoholism. Even for high-risk people, simply going swimming alongside the bacteria is never to make you unwell enough. The bacteria must discover a way to find yourself in your system to multiply and cause damage.

For some people, this consists of consuming food contaminated by the bacteria-typically uncooked oysters. Oysters eat by filtering out small particles in water, including bacteria, so they can contain much higher concentrations of Vibrio than the ocean itself. When someone eats a fresh or undercooked oyster, the bacteria can multiply in the gastrointestinal cause and tract nausea and stomach pain.

It can also lead to a life-threatening infection, as bacteria can move from the intestines into the bloodstream and cause contamination throughout your body. Because it spreads so quickly, it is able to overwhelm the physical body before the immune system has to be able to stop chlamydia. For other people, V. vulnificus can enter through broken pores and skin such as cuts, burns, or wounds.

Bacteria can multiply under the skin and cause a life-threatening illness often called flesh-eating disease, or necrotizing fasciitis, which can appear abruptly and spread quickly. The infections result in a fever and cause your skin to become typically, red, swollen, and painful at the site of infection. The bacteria do not actually “eat” the flesh, but this is what the condition can look like.