The cases of two deaths and two serious infections, observed last year in the United States, of which doctors could not understand until now, have finally found a definitive explanation. The cause had already been identified last October, and today all the details of the discovery were published in a report on the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine: Responsible was exposure to a lavender spray deodorant made in India and sold in one of the largest shopping mall chains in the United States, contaminated with a bacterium, the Burkholderia pseudomalleiwhich causes an infection known as melioiodosi.
But let’s go in order. How did he reconstruct the Washington Postthe story began in March 2021, when a 53-year-old woman from Kansas arrived in the emergency room complaining that she had suffered from cough, weakness and shortness of breath for the previous five days.
The woman, who among other things had previous health problems (in particular cardiovascular, liver and lung disorders) was diagnosed with pneumonia and a urinary tract infection, and was immediately hospitalized. The therapies did not work: the woman’s condition continued to worsen, leading to septic shock and then her death nine days later.
The autopsy revealed genetic traces of the bacterium in the woman’s body Burkholderia pseudomalleiresponsible for the onset of melioidosis, an infectious syndrome that manifests itself with pneumonia, urinary tract infection and other purulent infections, septic arthritis and, precisely, septic shock.
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After the Kansas case, there were three more very similar ones: a 4-year-old girl in Texas who was wheelchair-bound and unable to speak after suffering a sudden septic shock; a fifty-three-year-old man in Minnesota who arrived in the emergency room in a state of confusion and extreme weakness; a 5-year-old boy in Georgia who died after a sudden brain infection. Traces of B. pseudomallei were found in the blood of all three, and the diagnosis was the same for all: once again, melioidosis.
The issue that no one could figure out is that melioidosis is an endemic disease in South Asia and northwestern Oceania, where B. pseudomallei is quite common, but practically very rare in the United States and the rest of the world: how did the bacterium get there?
Finding out was not easy: “In April, immediately after the first death,” he told The Post Julia Petrasepidemiologist gave Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statunitensi, “we got activated immediately, and went to the woman’s house to collect soil and water samples.” The analyzes did not give any feedback; moreover, the doctors found that neither the woman nor any of her contacts had traveled to Asia in the period prior to the infection.
The same goes for the other three subsequent patients: “It was very strange,” Petras continues. “We began to wonder what was the most likely source of exposure for these four people, considering the hypothesis that they had come in contact with the bacterium by inhaling some product sprayed into the air.” By crossing the products found in the four homes, the scientists isolated a possible candidate, a lavender spray imported from India. Which actually tested positive for Burkhoderia pseudomallei when analyzed in the laboratory.
Immediately afterwards, the approximately 4 thousand bottles of product still on the market were withdrawn from the market, and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission invited all those who had bought it to immediately stop using it, to air the rooms, to clean every surface with which the product could have come into contact and to get rid of the bottle promptly.