A girl in Houston, Texas contracted a critical bacterial an infection from her cat — a primary within the historical past of the illness.
An unnamed 31-year-old affected person, whose story is recounted in a recent article within the American Journal of Case Reports, went to the clinic having had a fever and diarrhea for per week. She had just lately had a urinary tract an infection that was handled with antibiotics, which might typically trigger a micro organism known as clostridium difficile — typically known as C. diff — to develop uncontrolled and trigger gastrointestinal signs.
C. diff — typically known as a hospital “superbug” as a result of it’s also seen there — is a critical an infection. If left untreated, or if it’s a pressure immune to antibiotics, it could result in the colon bursting, and it has additionally been linked to colon most cancers. Besides these critical problems, it could additionally merely be extremely painful and uncomfortable for the affected person.
The affected person within the case report examined constructive for C. diff and was despatched home with a course of antibiotics, which appeared to resolve her signs.
However, two months later, she went to a clinic with the identical signs once more, this time together with nausea, chills and belly ache, and she or he examined constructive for a similar micro organism once more. A month later, nonetheless experiencing the signs, she requested a well being care supplier if a stray cat she had adopted — a couple of month earlier than she first developed her signs — could have one thing to do along with her signs.
She took her cat to the veterinarian, the place the cat additionally examined constructive for C. diff and was given a course of antibiotics. The affected person then confirmed that after the cat had been handled, her signs additionally abated, and she or he was not testing constructive for C. diff.
While this particular state of affairs has by no means been described earlier than, in accordance with the examine authors from the Houston Methodist Hospital, it has been beforehand hypothesized that animals may transmit the micro organism to people.
Additionally, whereas it’s doubtless that this affected person caught the micro organism from her cat, the genes of the micro organism discovered from her and from the cat weren’t analyzed on this examine, in order that concrete hyperlink can’t be recognized.
The authors conclude that this case illuminates the significance of checking a affected person’s previous publicity to animals once they current with bacterial infections, because it supplies proof of a heretofore extraordinarily unusual transmission route of C. diff.
