Deadly tropical disease poses serious threat

A deadly and hard to detect disease called Melioidosis is present in more countries than previously though. A study predicts that that melioidosis is present in 79 countries, including 34 that have never reported the disease.

People with mellitus, chronic kidney disease or excessive alcohol intake are at high risk ok getting the disease.

Contracted through the skin, lungs or by drinking contaminated water, melioidosis can be difficult to diagnose as it mimics other diseases. The bacterium is resistant to a wide range of antimicrobials, and inadequate treatment may result in fatality rates exceeding 70%.

The study shows that South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific including all countries in Southeast Asia and tropical Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa and South America have the highest risk of being melioidosis hotspots.

‘Although melioidosis has been recognised for more than 100 years, awareness of it is still low, even among medical and laboratory staff in confirmed endemic areas,’ said study co-author Dr. Direk Limmathurotsakul, Head of Microbiology at MORU and Assistant Professor at Mahidol University (Thailand).

The study is the first to provide an evidence-based estimate of the global extent of melioidosis, which is caused by Burkholderia pseudomallei, a highly pathogenic bacterium commonly found in soil and water in South and Southeast Asia and northern Australia.

Led by researchers at Oxford University, the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok, Thailand, the University of Washington in Seattle and Mahidol University in Thailand, among others, the study is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

‘We hope that this paper will help to raise awareness of the disease among all healthcare workers in endemic areas, as the disease can be treated if it is caught early enough,’ said Oxford researcher Dr David Dance, one of the contributors to the report, who first highlighted the under-recognition of melioidosis 25 years ago and now studies infectious diseases including melioidosis at the Laos-Oxford-Mahosot-Wellcome Research Unit (LOMWRU) in Vientiane, Lao PDR.

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Category: Features, Health alert