How Flesh-eating Bacteria Work

That's just great on a T shirt. But um, the the all of our open wounds have been treated according to the stuff by step process included in this article. Yeah, did you read that sidebar? It's gruesome. Yeah, And you know what this is like. This kind of thing can strike fear into you when it's in the news, which it has been lately in Georgia and nationwide. But um, it's rare and we can't say that enough true, So don't freak out and don't start slathering yourself with antibacterial

gel and um. To the writer's credit, it is pointed out in this article it's like five cases of this a year worldwide, right, I didn't get that either way still even in the US now and like maybe and Dora, that'd be huge yea. Um, but chuck, after researching this plushaming bacteria scares out of you exactly. Yeah, we can't beep any longer. It's sad you just did. Man, you just found a work around said beep. So that's not

the same thing. Yeah, it's it's pretty scary because it's um silent and it can the silent killer, it can creep up on you. And in the case of Amy Copelan, who will get too sadly like she was going to the hospital for three days before they diagnosed it and by that time it was too late, too too late, because she survived obviously. But yeah, people, I was reading an article about her and she's just like tough as nails. They said, like, we're gonna have to amputate your leg,

and she said, like, let's do this. That's what she said. She couldn't even talk. She mouthed it far braver than me. I would have been, like, let's end this, right example, she wouldn't plug me right. Yeah, I heard now that she's up in about the first thing she did was take like a half gallon shot of Scotch and punch out at doctor just for fun. Alright, so we'll get to her tragic but inspiring story, okay, um, I was

going to use her as an intro. Go ahead, then, all right, so I get to it right now, Amy Copeland. She's Um twenty four. She's a Georgia lady, um, and she was on a zip line at a friend's house and fell off. I don't know if the zip line broke or if she like go or whatever, but it was it was a malfunction. It wasn't. It was over like a raveni creak over some brackish water. And in brackish water, actually in all fresh water, there is a

bacteria called aromonous hydrophilia or a hydrophilia, and it's everywhere. Normally, if you ingest a little bit of this, you it's through swallow water and it gives you the poops. That's it. The reason why just diarrhea is because you have whole colonies of bacteria and antibodies in your stomach that are designed specifically to take on a hydrophilia and put smack down on it. It's part of your immune system, right, thankfully.

The thing is with Amy Copeland, she had a gash in her leg from when she fell and the bacteria got in that way, and that is a whole different host of problems. Exactly. Your body is not used to fending off bacteria through wounds, and there are certain types of bacteria which are generally known as flesh eating bacteria that basically mounts the largest, most vicious, virulent campaign of

any bacteria around in your human body. This is what I didn't quite get though, because you did this part as additional research, which I appreciate, but I'm not quite sure. Is it a dummy attack is going on? You want to get into this? This is how flush eating bacteria. I mean, we might as well go ahead and tackle this and then we'll finish up Amy story then get into it. Okay, So um, what happens? What happens? This

the bacteria which is again a a hydrophilia. It's everywhere and where our bodies are used to it strep the same group a strep. Yeah, that's what gives a strep throat. It's everywhere of people are carriers, right, These things are everywhere and normally when they get into our body through normal channels. Our body knows how to ward it off. When they come in through a wound, you have potentially big trouble. Um and these bacteria are capable of producing

um toxins. There's entero toxins, which are cytotoxins, meaning like they directly go and like kill cells, they like weaken the membrane or something like that. So um they can go and attack tissues. And then another thing that they might express genetically is um exotoxins. Right, these are the ones where if you if you have a bacteria that expresses exotoxins, No that I thought that prompts the immune response.

It does. The problem is that these bacteria are are prompts are setting off almost it seems like purposefully an immune response from your T cells, but it's too big and this huge response comes about and it's like this big, lumbering, clumsy response from your T cells. So your T cells are going haywire because this basically dummy attack has been launched by this bacteria to this rack the T cells. So this is what I don't get. Are they are the T cells attacking the wrong thing. The T cells

aren't attacking anything. The T cells going on high alert signal, the production of cytokines, which are like signals. They're like triggers like histamines are. They're an immune response trigger. Cytokines are the cytokines In turn, UM overproduced or over excite macrophages and those things go and like eat cell detritus or detritus. Actually listen to the pronunciation actually detritus okay,

so eats cell detritus. So they're going, hey wire and then um, last, but not least, they promote the release of free radicals, which normally go and target bacteria. But in this huge undirected immune response, bacteria has purposefully triggered UM. The free radicals are attacking all this tissue. So you have cytotoxic um in taro talk sense that the bacteria is producing directly, and then it's also indirectly affecting this healthy tissue by promoting the release of free radicals. It

does seem purposeful. It very much like it sits around and reads the art of war and decides, this is how I'm going to take you down exactly, and it works like a charm. So you have your tissue that's being destroyed, right yeah, which is where you get the term necrotizing faciitis, which is the correct term for um flash eating bacteria. That's right, and um you it also promotes something called toxic shock syndrome. Is that when your organs starts shutting down. That's part of it. Wow, yeah,

all right, well that makes sense. And that's scary. And the scariest part of all this is that it starts out by something really tiny, like it can be a pin prick of an open wound. It doesn't have to be some big gash on your leg. And it starts out of something small and turns into something big, which

is really scary. And you know, if you if you have a cut on your hand, on your leg, and you actually if even if you haven't been in any kind of brackish water, if you just if it starts to hurt a lot worse than you think it should, then it's probably not one of the five cases, but you should probably start looking into it. Well, what was surprising to me was it doesn't even have to be a cut, man, it could be an abrasion, a bruise.

How could a bruise I don't get that. I I don't know if your skin is thinned out at that site really like so thin it and just get through the outer dermots maybe, um, but yeah you can, And it doesn't just have to be like you said, brackish water. Like if you have a cut an open wound on your finger and you're around somebody with strep throat, yeah,

you could conceivably. All the stuff is in place for you to to contract necrotizing fasciitists and it can go person to person for sure, but without an open wound, it's pretty unlikely, right, Like that's how they get in. Yeah, and they eat the fat that the tissue, and then they start to consume your organs. Right, And the reason the flesh eating bacteria is clinically the clinical term is

necrotizing fasciitists, which means the killing of fascia. Fascia is like this membrane that access connecting tissue between your skin and fatty layer and your muscles and joints and tendons and ligaments and bones and organs, and it's this uninterrupted membrane that covers your entire body beneath your skin. It's like, um, one of those what are they called, the one guy sent it to us. We have a green screen one.

Oh the root suit, Yeah, the body suit. It's like a root suit, but it's been between your skin and your muscles. This is where this infection takes place. And since it's uninterrupted, it can go everywhere. It's just basically chugs along and separates your skin from your muscles by killing all the tissue around it. Well, and the other scary part is it's really really really fast. Like this

football player from the University of Tulsa died in a week. Uh. Big healthy tight end, you know, like you don't have to be weak, and you don't have to be old or a child like you can attack anyone that gets it and take you out pretty quickly. Yeah. Uh and and just a matter of days, like you said, he can go from a pin prick to you know, you just lost your leg. Yeah, well, which is what happened

with Amy Copeland. I mean, it's a miracle that she's alive right now, but she ended up having her left leg completely amputated, her right foot, both of her hands, and part of her torso. And she got out of the hospital and like I mean, it took a while, but then I think two or three days later she was already had taught herself about to eat. This company has thrown in to build like a thirty addition to our home for like rehabilitation stuff, and uh yeah, it's

pretty amazing. Like her, her spirit, her dad has been um posting like crazy on like Facebook and on her website they started. And she's a bad man, majamma, way better than me. She's tough, very inspiring. Um, so wouldn't let's say if it's also crazy, Chuck, It's not just her. There was another dude from Cartersville, Georgia, who had another necrotizing fasciitis case, and they were actually in the rooms next to one another at one while there at I

think a burn center in Augusta. Was it because this place is like one of the one of the few places in Georgia that like knows what they're doing with necrotizing fasciitists. Um, and so you know, how do you treat this thing? Well, the first thing you do once it's diagnosed is like huge, huge, heavy doses of antibiotics

to obviously to try and kill it. But like we're not talking like Papa pill every six hours, no, like cons then tripped just basically flooding your body with it um and immunoglobin globe and immunoglobe, and Jerry thought that was funny. Yeah, I heard. Uh. So they want to remove like any of the dying flesh and try and try and isolate it and remove the bad parts, which is what they were doing with her, and it just spread so quickly. You know, they were like fighting a

really uphill battle in her case. I read a case study. Have you seen any pictures of this stuff? Um? No, m hm. So I wrote a case study of this woman who came in and she had it in her arm and um, you could just first of all, her arms swollen. It was like cabbage patch kid's army. But then there's like splotches of like purple splotches of black, and then um, what's called desquamation, where like the top

layer of skin is just peeling off. And all of this had happened to her like over the course of hours and as they were treating it. One of the things that they'll do before amputation is called the bride mint where basically they take the the limb that's infected or the area that's infected and they just scrape the tissue. I read about that, Um, I saw a picture of it.

It's horrific. Yeah, I didn't look at the pictures. Um. And then after that they have to treat it with skin grafts, after after it's been after they got all of it, hopefully, if they that's what she did on her torso yeah, okay. And if they can't get it, then they amputate. Yeah, it's a pretty serious condition. Okay. So what the lookout for. We said, if you have like a a smallish wound that's like disproportionately painful, you should go on high alert. If it becomes like swollen

and red and hot, that's a really bad sign. If you get typical things you might associate with bacteria and back to your own infection, like diarrhea and fever and chills, nausea and vomiting, that's a really bad time too, especially if you have just a small cut on your arm, So that nausea, vomiting, all that stuff could be the result of UM, the infection. It could also be the infection leading to toxic shock syndrome, which in and of

itself is pretty interesting. Apparently we've only known about that since nineteen Yeah, Um, do you remember like associating it with tampons. No. Well, when it first came out, like almost all the case studies of this toxic shock syndrome, which is like basically your organ multi organ failure, which is three or more UM, lowered blood pressure, all this other stuff. Um, all of the cases were of people who are using like high absorbency tampons. They were women.

Then they started to look more and more and they realized that that didn't hold true when you looked at more of the case studies are a lot of men and everything. And now they realize that it's the result of an infection. So like the lower blood pressure is like your body mounting this huge immune to ends and um, so histamines are released, so your blood vessels dilate, so

your blood pressure decreases to a really dangerous level. It's basically your body having this enormous allergic reaction to an infection. And it had nothing to do with tampons. No, it did. It still did, but they thought it was just tampons that triggered toxic shock. Yeah. Even still there's like warnings on boxes. I think that like toxic shock syndrome warning. Jeez, that's pretty scary. I had older sisters. I did too,

but I didn't get in her business. UM. So in the first twenty four hours, you know you're gonna feel these pains. UM the second I'm sorry, three to four days in, UM, there's gonna be some swelling, and that's when you might get this purply rash or like blisters that are filled with a dark fluid. That's not a good sign at all. And UM, your skin even at that point, even three to four days in might start to flake off and turn white or dark, and that

is definitely a bad sign. That's the disquamation. UM. Then four to five days in, that's when the toxic shock happens. And you're pretty lucky if you haven't been treated at this point to to make it out alive. All right, toxic shock alone of cases are fatal with UM flesh eating bacteria. Overall, the thirty to forty I saw is the lowest of cases. So should we talk about wound care? Sure, I've never cleaned a wound like this, Well, then you

haven't been cleaning your wounds correctly. This is one of the ways to prevent flesh eating bacteria. That's right. You want to flesh your wound with cold water initially, no soap, and in fact, you don't even want to get soap into the wound. Apparently you want to clean around it with with soap and the cloth and then get some alcohol and put it on your tweezers. Use the tweezers to clean out any gunk that's in there in the woon site. Yeah, I've never stuck tweezers in one of

my cuts ever. Well, that means you didn't have anything in there, or you didn't you didn't know it. No, I didn't. I was like, I'm not putting tweezers in there. Uh. Then you want to apply a bandage if it's a place that can be exposed to dirt. And they say to ask a doctor whether or not to bandage, because sometimes wounds are better unbandaged and heal quicker. Sometimes they're better bandaged. And then the old antibodyquintment we'll always do

you right, don't forget that. Well, yeah, I almost always put a band aid on. I've never had a wound where I'm like, well, I probably shouldn't put a band aid. Symbolic band aid. Um, what else you got? I've got some other stuff like risk factors, Um, you can be totally healthy. Just from the badness of Amy Copeland, I assume she's probably a healthy person. Yeah. I think a lot of people typically are healthy. UM. So you can still come down with flashing in bacteria necrotizing fascitists as

a healthy person. Um. But there are some risk factors that that would put you in the higher likelihood camp. Um. If you've had an infection recently, especially with a rash like chicken pox. That's one. Cuts, abrasions, those are big ones. UM. Steroid use. You don't want to be using steroids anyway, but even if they were prescribed and you have a cut, I think steroid um steroids prevent cuts from healing is fast. So I think those two combined make you at a

higher risk if your immune system is lower. Sure you've been sick, yeah, Uh, diabetes is a big one. Yeah. Yeah. And then if you are a black tar heroine user. There have been outbreaks of um necrotizing fascitists among heroin user before. There was one in the late nineties in San Francisco, and black tar in particular, Uh, set you up for it because it's like this lower purity heroine that's gummy, it's gummi er than regular heroin, so it

collapses your veins like almost immediately. So people who shoot black tar heroin do what's called skin popping, where they shoot it just under the skin or into their muscles um. And then because it's not the least bit refined, that's why it's gummy um. There's often impurities, and sometimes some of those impurities are Claustralia, which is a kind of bacteria that can be a flesh eating bacteria. So basically, if you're shooting black tar heroin, you're running the risk

of directly injecting flesh eating bacteria. And there's people who have lost arms, shoulders, ribs two flesh eating bacteria by shooting black tar heroin. I think the stuff you should know advice is to not do heroin. Let's just go ahead and just throw that out there. I could get behind that. You're avoiding a whole host of problems if you don't do heroin the age. So what else can

you do to prevent it? We'll keep the wounds clean, wash your hands a lot, and that means warm water and soap and like fifteen to twenty seconds of good scrubbing, like you're going into surgery, get between the fingers, dry it off really well. And then after you dry it off, don't go and put your hand back on the faucet to turn it off in a public bathroom or even your own bathroom, although I don't know if I would do that in my own home. No, I think your

own homes, Okay. I feel like there should be some sort of I mean, it could lead to a resident superbugs, but we already faced tho, so what do we have to loose? But I feel like there should be more um cleaning products handy in like public bathrooms. Well there are increasingly you see those little hand sanitizer machines. I mean, like here's a bottle of like bleach water and just

go ahead and spray that toilet seat or well. I'm not like a Hour Hughes type, but I definitely after I wash my hands in the bathroom in public, like, I don't put my hand on the door handle or anything like that. Always try and muscle my way out or put a paper twel between me and the thing. I'm extremely conscious of that too, especially at the gym. Yeah, I've been more conscious about it, which pops up with your character in an episode in our TV show that's

coming out. That's right, a little uh teaser, Yeah, big teaser right there. That's true. You got anything else? Uh? No? I mean Amy Copeland's story has been prominent lately obviously, and they are accepting donations, and I think we would be remiss if we didn't announce that. Um, she spells her name a I M E. So it's a I M E E c O p E l A n d dot com slash donations and just go to the website anyway, and just her stories on there and her progress is on there, and it's uh both frightening and

inspiring in her case. So uh, it's definitely I think that triggered our desire to do this, right or did it well? Yeah, I mean just that. Not only that, but it seemed that, uh, nobody really had a good idea of um, what flesh eating bacteria does. Loudly local news reports yeah, and I mean not even local, like the national stuff too, is like, you know, um, really misinformed. Like they're like each through your tissue. It doesn't eat through your tissue. No nobody dug into how it really works.

It's very frustrating, you know why, because it's way easier just to scare people with things with non facts, right, But this is one of the ones where it was like the more I looked into it, the more scared I became. Even people are lazy. Um oh, I got a little more alright at more so Like. It wasn't until nine two that somebody used the term neckartizing fasciitists and we really started to understand that it was bacteria or whatever. Um. But the we knew about it since

the Civil War. Wow, that's crazy what they call it though in the Civil War. Uh well, they used to name it, according to the doctor who reported it um so like. And it was also based on the area of the body that was infected. So like if you had furniers or Fournier's gang green, it meant that you had flesh eating bacteria around your genitals. If you had ludwigs, um angina meant your head, flesh eating bacteria around your

face or mouth or jaw. Yeah. And then they figured out like, oh wait, we should classify by the kind of bacteria and that these are not separate things like this is all the same thing. These people have had like a cut around there that this got into boy, you're in big trouble back then too. If you're in

big trouble now, imagine back then pretty scary. Well. The first guy to described as a Confederate Civil War surgeon named Joseph Joe, and I'm sure he was like, I can't do anything for you, man, right, he retired to the country. So that's it. Flesh eating bacteria. UM. If you want to learn more about it, you can type that in flesh hyphen eating bacteria uh into the search bar at how stuff works dot com and that will bring up listener mail. I am going to call this uh.

We love the Irish as always, Uh, Josh and Chuck and Jerry. Just a short note from an old geezer UH living in Limerick in Ireland, who is one of your most devoted bands for the last number of years. When walking my dogs every Sunday on the mountains of Oreland and alpine areas, occasionally I'm listening to stuff you should know in the iPod. My biggest problem is that I've not been able to source a set of earphones that will suit my border collies, who was cool, intelligent

piece would easily tune into you. Laid back Southern dudes, so he wants his dogs to listen. That's nice. I thoroughly enjoyed the show, in particular You're Easy symbiotic style, and I've recommended it wildly. In particular, I enjoyed the shrunken head show because I used to have one. How you might ask, My sister worked in Columbia in the seventies and eighties and brought me home a present of a shrunken head. It looked very real, so the first

question I asked was is it real? No, it's not, she said, but added, if you really want a genuine head, I'll bring one next time. Needless to say, I decline, which was a big mistaken. The original head is still hanging behind the bar of a pub on the west coast of uh CEO dot Claire. Is that county County Claire? All right, that's what they do in Ireland, CEO and that is from Mike keys uh. And then Judy and Glenn are the dogs. He named his dogs Judy and

Glenn ver I know. And he's just marching around Ireland. Let's and THENTO us also with the shrunken head around his neck. I guess we'll keep marching Glenn and Judy and Mike is the human Mike human. Thank you very much for writing in on behalf of all three of you. It's pretty cool. Um, so this one was a unior request. If you have a request, we want to hear it. We're always looking for good topic suggestions. UM. You can tweet to us s y s K podcast topical request

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