Tag Archives: Campylobacter

Australia (Canberra): Puppy ban over aged care Campylobacter illness scare

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Health offi­cials have rec­om­mended pup­pies be banned from aged care facil­i­ties after two out­breaks of poten­tially deadly Campy­lobac­ter gas­troen­teri­tis in a Can­berra nurs­ing home. But trained adult dogs will still be able to visit aged care homes.

Accord­ing to a paper to be pre­sented at a Com­mu­ni­ca­ble Dis­eases Con­fer­ence in Can­berra on 19 March 2013, 15 peo­ple were infected dur­ing two sep­a­rate gas­troen­teri­tis out­breaks in the nurs­ing home between April and June 2012. A healthy four-month-old puppy was iden­ti­fied as the likely cause of the out­breaks and excluded from the facility.

An expert panel was estab­lished to inves­ti­gate the case. “Campy­lobac­ter jejuni was recov­ered from both human and canine fecal sam­ples,” the study find­ings said. “A review of pub­lished lit­er­a­ture showed pup­pies exten­sively shed Campy­lobac­ter species. The aged care set­ting and low infec­tive dose also made trans­mis­sion likely, despite the vary­ing degrees of con­tact between the puppy and cases. While infec­tion con­trol prac­tices were gen­er­ally appro­pri­ate, the facility’s ani­mal pol­icy did not ade­quately address poten­tial zoonotic risk.”

Elderly peo­ple infected with Campy­lobac­ter have an increased risk of hos­pi­tal­iza­tion and death. The panel rec­om­mended the puppy be excluded from the aged care home until it was at least a year old and assessed as being suited for an aged care envi­ron­ment. The panel decided pup­pies should not be con­sid­ered as aged care com­pan­ions due to “high rates of Campy­lobac­ter car­riage and shed­ding; their social imma­tu­rity; sus­cep­ti­bil­ity of elderly res­i­dents to infec­tion; and poor outcomes”.

In 2012, health author­i­ties were offi­cially noti­fied of 477 campy­lobac­te­rio­sis cases in the Aus­tralian Cap­i­tal Ter­ri­tory and 15,645 cases nationally.

(ProMED 3/18/2013)

USA (Alaska): Two dozen people ill, two hospitalized due to Campylobacter infection from raw milk

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State health offi­cials said on 5 March 2013 that a total of 24 peo­ple have fallen ill, two of whom were hos­pi­tal­ized, after drink­ing tainted raw milk from a Kenai Penin­sula dairy. Among the ill is an infant who did not directly imbibe the raw milk, but got sick through a sec­ondary trans­mis­sion from an adult who had. State epi­demi­ol­o­gists said the ill­nesses are the result of milk tainted with Campy­lobac­ter, a bac­terium com­monly found in cow manure.

After receiv­ing mul­ti­ple reports of sick peo­ple, state health offi­cials traced the source of the out­break to a cow share pro­gram at the Penin­sula Dairy. State vet­eri­nar­i­ans vis­ited the farm to take sam­ples and said the farm owner is being coop­er­a­tive with their inves­ti­ga­tion. Dr. Brian Yablon, an epi­demi­ol­o­gist with the State of Alaska, said that, with raw milk, infec­tions like this are vir­tu­ally unavoid­able. “The bot­tom line for any oper­a­tion that is pro­vid­ing raw milk,” Yablon said, “there’s no way to make a ster­ile prod­uct… and that’s why, from a pub­lic health per­spec­tive, we encour­age peo­ple if they’re going to drink milk, to just drink pas­teur­ized milk.”

Back­ers of the nation­wide raw milk move­ment have claimed that unpas­teur­ized, unho­mog­e­nized raw milk — from appro­pri­ately clean farms — can pro­vide a range of health ben­e­fits. But Yablon said the real­i­ties of milk pro­duc­tion make raw milk inher­ently risky. “No mat­ter how safe the process is thought to be, there is always poten­tial for con­t­a­m­i­na­tion,” he said. “You have the absolute best of inten­tions, and the best of prac­tices, but just the way the cow’s anatomy is, the udder being so close to where the cow is excret­ing, the fact that the tail can flick things around, there are many dif­fer­ent steps along the way where con­t­a­m­i­na­tion can be introduced.”

The last out­break of campy­lobac­te­rio­sis state epi­demi­ol­o­gists dealt with was from a 2011 out­break in the Mat-Su Val­ley that sick­ened 18 peo­ple. That out­break was also linked to raw milk from a cow-share pro­gram. “It’s just not a prod­uct that’s ever going to be 100% safe,” Yablon said. “There’s always the poten­tial for con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, and this is the lat­est exam­ple here in Alaska.”

(ProMED 3/5/2013)

USA (Alaska): Campylobacter outbreak associated with consumption of raw milk

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The pur­pose of this Health Advi­sory is to alert the pub­lic to new infor­ma­tion about the recent and poten­tially ongo­ing out­break of Campy­lobac­ter infec­tions asso­ci­ated with con­sum­ing raw milk dis­trib­uted by a Kenai-based cow-share program.

As of 22 Feb­ru­ary 2013, a total of 18 indi­vid­u­als have been iden­ti­fied in this out­break. Some of these indi­vid­u­als have had recur­rent ill­ness. Two required hos­pi­tal­iza­tion. The Sec­tion of Epi­demi­ol­ogy is plan­ning to con­tact indi­vid­u­als sus­pected of receiv­ing or con­sum­ing raw milk from the involved farm, and it is expected that the num­ber of prob­a­ble and con­firmed cases will rise.

All prob­a­ble and con­firmed cases have been linked to con­sump­tion of raw milk from a farm on the Kenai Penin­sula that oper­ates a cow-share pro­gram. The milk is dis­trib­uted to share­hold­ers through­out the Kenai Penin­sula, in Anchor­age, and in Sitka. There is at least one sec­ondary case of an infant who became ill after hav­ing close con­tact with a laboratory-confirmed case.

The full arti­cle may be accessed at http://www.promedmail.org/direct.php?id=20130225.1559143

(ProMED 2/25/2013)