Jakarta – Cases of meat-eating bacterial infections are increasingly reported in the United States. This also happened to Linard Lyons, a fisherman on the southwest of New orleans.
At that time, he was catching crabs for his grandchildren, but he later realized there was a small scratch on his foot. The wound almost claimed Lyons’s life.
Initially, Lyons continued to move as usual. But the next day he woke up in a delusional state, accompanied by fever and vomiting. At first, he thought it was just ordinary pain, until he found a black wound spreading on his left leg.
Lyons promptly saw a family doctor,who recognized his condition and sent him to the emergency room.Within an hour, he was in the hospital operating room.
Meat-eating bacterial infection
The small scratch on Lyons’s foot turned out to be the entrance for Vibrio vulnificus, a bacterium known as a ‘meat-eater.’ The black wound is a sign of necrotizing fasciitis, a serious infection that damages the tissue under the skin, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
These dangerous bacteria breed in warm coastal waters, especially in brackish waters where freshwater mixes with the sea.the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted cases of Vibrio infections on the East Coast jumped 800 percent between 1988 and 2018.Chance
“I was asked, ‘Can we do what needs to be done to save your life?'” Lyons recalled, quoted from CNN.
Those were the last words he heard before being anesthetized for surgery. Lyons knew his legs were threatened with amputation.At that time,the doctor gave a survival verdict of only 50 percent.
Luckily, the medical team managed to stop the spread of infection without having to amputate his foot. After three days in intensive care…