Florida man eats feral pig meat, contracts rare biothreat bacteria
ARS TECHNICA – A Florida man was gifted the bloody meat of a feral pig, which he handled with his bare hands before cooking and eating it. In doing so, he inadvertently exposed himself to a highly infectious bacterium considered a potential bioterror threat.
The man developed an insidious infection that lurked in his heart implant and took doctors nearly two years to properly diagnose.
The bacterium at hand is Brucella suis, which typically infects pigs. The bacterium is not particularly deadly, but it can spread by air and only takes a few bacterial cells to cause an infection, making it a good potential weapon.
In 1954, B. suis became the first biological agent to be weaponized by the US government as part of its offensive biological warfare program.
Once the man’s infection was finally diagnosed, he was treated with an effective antibiotic regimen to clear it. He also got a new heart implant and made a full recovery.
Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body
A Florida man adopted a daily diet of six to nine pounds of cheese, sticks of butter, and hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them.
He made the medical literature after eight months, when he showed up to cardiologist’s with cholesterol literally oozing out of his hands, feet, and elbows.
As the cholesterol was trying to escape his body, it created painless, yellowish nodules filled with lipids. The condition is called xanthoma and most often presents with nodules around the eye.
The cardiologists tested the man’s blood cholesterol levels and found that they exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, the target level of total cholesterol for good cardiovascular health is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL or over is considered high.
It’s unclear how things ended up for the man, but at least his doctors did not report that he died—at least not yet. Generally, xanthoma itself is benign; his cholesterol levels, on the other hand, put him at significant risk of cardiovascular disease.
Beth Mole is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes.
