Doctors probing an anthrax outbreak among heroin users in Europe have identified the first of 10 fatal cases, widening the hunt for the source of the tainted drug.
Health Protection Scotland confirmed yesterday an anthrax infection in a heroin user who died in the Glasgow area on Dec. 12. The first death was previously reported to have occurred in the city’s Victoria Infirmary on Dec. 16.
At least 18 drug users in Scotland and one in Germany have been infected in the outbreak, probably from injecting or smoking heroin contaminated by anthrax spores.
Health Protection Scotland said in a statement on Saturday that there is no evidence of person-to-person transmission of the bacterium, which killed five people in the US in a 2001 anthrax attack.
HARMFUL BACTERIA
“While public health investigations are continuing to attempt to identify the source of the contamination, no drug samples tested to date have shown anthrax contamination, although a number of other types of potentially harmful bacteria have been found,” Colin Ramsay, an agency epidemiologist, said in the statement.
“It must therefore be assumed that all heroin in Scotland carries the risk of anthrax contamination and users are advised to cease taking heroin by any route,” he said.
“The risk to the general public is very low,” Ramsay and colleagues said in a Jan. 14 study in the journal Eurosurveillance.
FLESH-EATING DISEASE
The anthrax-infected patients mostly had inflammation or abscesses around the injection site at least one or two days following administration of the opiate and were hospitalized about four days later, according to the study. In the most severe cases, the lesions developed a flesh-eating disease known as necrotising fasciitis.
Anthrax mostly occurs in wild and domestic animals such as cattle, sheep, goats, camels and antelopes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta.
It can infect the skin, lungs and digestive system of humans when they are exposed to infected animals or infected animal tissue.
The disease can be fatal if it isn’t treated early with effective antibiotics, the CDC said. Anthrax bacteria are found globally, especially in developing countries in South and Central America, Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Middle East.
German physician Robert Koch first identified the bacteria which caused anthrax in 1875. His pioneering work was one of the first demonstrations that diseases could be caused by microbes.
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