Our Warming Planet Is a Petri Dish for New and Deadly Microbes
Key takeaways
- When V. vulnificus enters a wound, it damages blood vessels, causing them to leak plasma into surrounding tissues.
- A medical helicopter arrived within twenty minutes.
- For most of Spear’s lifetime, infections of V. vulnificus north of Georgia were rare.
In the near future, someone you know could be infected with climate-changed microbes.Illustration by Jérôme Berthier Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story On a sweltering morning last July, Vernon Spear, a burly eighty-five-year-old with thinning gray hair, went to check a chicken-wire crab trap that was hanging from a dock in Cambridge, Maryland. Spear is a lifelong resident of the Eastern Shore, near where the Choptank River flows into the Chesapeake Bay. He lives less than fifty yards from the dock. He was pleased to find that the trap held six feisty blue crabs, a local delicacy that he likes to steam and sprinkle with Old Bay. As Spear reached in, however, he scraped his arm on some metal, drawing blood. He wasn’t worried; he’d been scratched many times before. But, in the hours that followed, Spear’s arm began to turn violent shades of purple and red. His wife, Lea, thought it looked like he’d been badly burned. Soon his arm swelled up—liquid appeared to be pooling under the skin—and he rushed to his local emergency room. A clinician suspected an infection of Vibrio vulnificus, which under a microscope looks like a kidney bean with a tail. It is popularly known as flesh-eating bacteria.
When V. vulnificus enters a wound, it damages blood vessels, causing them to leak plasma into surrounding tissues. The immune system tries to protect the body by calling in clotting cells to halt the leaking; in the process, the cells cut off blood flow, prompting flesh to become necrotic. The bacteria can cause shock, sepsis, and multi-organ failure. Infections that reach the bloodstream prove deadly at least fifty per cent of the time.
A medical helicopter arrived within twenty minutes. Spear was flown to the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Medical Center, in Baltimore. There was no question that he would need surgery. Rather, his doctors wondered if they would be able to save his life. Antibiotics on their own are of limited use against a V. vulnificus infection. The best way to control the bacteria is to cut away the affected flesh. Surgeons worked quickly to excise layers from Spear’s forearm. When he regained consciousness, hours later, he was aghast. He could see into his arm; the muscle and bone were exposed. “It was just a big hole,” he told me.