Silent garden killer claims four lives in 'unprecedented' Aussie outbreak

Yahoo

20-02-2025

An Aussie city is grappling with an 'unprecedented' number of residents contracting a silent yet potentially fatal disease that has claimed the lives of four people this year.
Since January, 41 cases of melioidosis — a serious illness caused by bacteria found lurking in tropical North Australian soils and water — have been recorded in Cairns and its surrounding hinterland region.
Local health authorities revealed last week that an investigation was underway after two people had tragically died from the disease, which is commonly associated with heavy rainfall events. The number of fatalities has now doubled, Tropical Public Health Services director Dr Jacqueline Murdoch confirmed on Wednesday.
Since the wet season kicked off in November, almost 60 people have presented to Cairns Hospital with melioidosis, and additional cases have appeared in Townsville, James Cook University microbiologist Jeffrey Warner told Yahoo News Australia. The bacteria is also common in Darwin, but the city has recorded far fewer infections this year.
'The number of cases in Cairns is particularly high and unprecedented,' Warner said, noting that most people who have fallen ill appear to reside in the city's south, where researchers and clinicians have previously found an association between the disease and road works.
'We know that disruption of the environment releases the bacteria from the soil and during times of heavy rain, the bacteria can move around in the environment in water and even in the air, and people can be exposed as they expose themselves to that environment,' he added.
The bacteria that causes melioidosis — nicknamed the 'great mimicker' due to its difficulty to diagnose — is commonly contracted through cuts on the skin that are exposed to mud and soil during the wet season. However, the most serious cases, which can lead to pneumonia and sepsis, occur during severe weather events when people breathe it in.
Those who are diabetic, consume a lot of alcohol or suffer from a compromised immune system are more at risk.
Symptoms, such as a fever, difficulty breathing and coughing, 'can start very quickly after exposure to the bacteria but also can be slow, usually on average about nine days but between 1-21 is possible', the associate professor explained.
Given this, Cairns may see even more cases before the rain eases off in March.
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While melioidosis has been thoroughly studied in the Northern Territory, Warner said in North Queensland, 'very rarely' do experts know 'exactly where people get the organism from and how they actually get it'.
However, they do know the bacteria — which has also emerged in the state's south — is on the move.
'We found in Townsville that after only about 30mm of rain, there's enough water to fill dry creek beds and that water is chock a block full of the melioidosis organism,' Warner told Yahoo.
'So as the rain comes, it leeches the organism out of the soil and into water courses. Then the water just takes the organism wherever the course can lead and when we get floods, and those get breached, then the organism gets seeded into the environment more widely.
'If that environment is suitable for the organism to replicate in, it will effectively get planted there and then potentially establish a new focus, which could increase threat to humans in places that it wasn't previously known to be.'
Warner and a team of experts are now hoping to stop the spread by kicking off a five-year $1.5 million grant project that will investigate where the bacteria lives and how people acquire it.
Sentinel sites will be established this year in Cairns and Townsville to investigate its preferred environment and how climate change impacts the availability and persistence of the organism.
'Therefore [we'll] be able to help predict the risks associated with climate and environmental changes to the liberating, or the revealing of the organism, and therefore the exposure risk for humans,' Warner said. The team is also recruiting past or current patients and their families so they can study their immediate surroundings.
'Once we do all of those things, we're going to develop risk assessment maps for North Queensland,' he added. They will include areas where people are not yet residing but may move in the future, and will aid councils when they consider approving new housing developments or road works.
'This ultimately is going to hopefully help us predict where it currently is and where the disease might be…and therefore the relative risk of people acquiring the disease.'
If you have contracted melioidosis and want to participate in Warner's grant project, you can contact him at [e-mail].
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