Note: This piece is important considering how frequently potential non-human disease hosts are transferred across the world in shipping containers, hay and grain, between shelters, in a variety of animal trailers and on migratory species.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has asked healthcare workers to look for symptoms of melioidosis in patients. Melioidosis is a rare disease caused by the bacteria Burkholderia pseudomallei. The bacteria typically live in tropical and subtropical climates outside the continental U.S. but are now considered endemic in in the Gulf Coast region of southern Mississippi. B. pseudomallei infections of mammalian and non-mammalian hosts are opportunistic.
B. pseudomallei opportunistically infects humans and a wide range of animals directly from the environment, and modeling of experimental melioidosis has been conducted in numerous biologically relevant models, including mammalian and invertebrate hosts.
Sources:
- Potentially deadly kind of bacteria has been found in US. . . , INSIDER, July 28, 2022. Link. Author: Catherine Schuster-Bruce, MBChB – Medicine
- Evaluation of surrogate animal models of melioidosis, Frontiers in Microbiology, December 29, 2010. Link. A wide variety of animals are opportunistically infected with pseudomallei from the environment, where the increased incidence of melioidosis amongst certain animal species has led to conclusions regarding the susceptibility to infection.