Experts fear US spread after 5 deaths

It could be a silent killer lurking in your backyard.

Experts are sounding the alarm about the danger of a deadly bacteria found in American gardens after it killed scores of people in Australia this year.

Burkholderia pseudomallei, a bacterium present in soil and water in tropical regions, can cause Melioidosis, a lung infection that can result in pneumonia or sepsis and has a mortality rate of up to 50% in some cases.

In 2024 alone, five people in Australia have died from the disease, which was contracted after contact with contaminated soil.

Experts fear that natural disasters such as hurricanes, storms and bad weather could increase the risk of its spread in the United States.

“The most serious way that people can get it is when there are severe weather events, such as monsoonal storms, and in particular, when there are tropical cyclones with wind and rain, the bacteria are aerosolized and people can then breathe them in,” Bart Currie. , a professor of medicine at the Menzies School of Health Research, told Yahoo News.

“Especially if people get caught in storms and severe weather – even healthy people can get very sick from it. This is what causes the most severe form of melioidosis, which is a very severe pneumonia that turns into blood poisoning.”

While the bacteria is most commonly found in Asia and Australia, cases of melioidosis have been found in the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and even Mississippi. In 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified cases of the disease in patients from Texas, Minnesota, Kansas and Georgia.

Last year, the CDC declared an endemic due to the spread of the disease on the Gulf Coast. At the time, experts said that people with kidney and liver problems are at an increased risk of infection, which is sometimes asymptomatic.

If symptoms occur, they include fever, headache, muscle aches, confusion, chest pain, breathing problems and seizures. The disease requires a round of IV antibiotics for two weeks and months of oral antibiotics after that.

“This is one of those diseases that’s called the great imitator because it can look like so many different things,” Julia Petras, epidemic intelligence service officer for the CDC’s National Center for Emerging Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases, previously told HealthDay News .

“It’s so under-reported and under-diagnosed and under-recognized — we often like to say it’s been the neglected and neglected tropical disease.”