Four men in Georgia, all living in the same county, mysteriously became infected with a potentially deadly soil bacterium that’s normally found in the tropics and subtropics, particularly Southeast Asia and northern Australia. The four cases were tied together not just by their shared location but also by the bacterial strain; whole genome sequencing showed the bacteria causing all four infections were highly related, suggesting a shared source of their infections.
But this bacterium doesn’t tend to jump from person to person. And none of the men had recent travel that explained the infection. In fact, only one of the men had ever been to a place where the bacterium lives, but it was decades before his infection. And there’s another twist: The four infections spanned decades. The first occurred in 1983, the second in 1989, and the last two occurred a day apart in September 2024.
In a newly published study in Emerging Infectious Diseases, state and federal health researchers suggest that the four linked cases indicate that the dangerous bacterium—Burkholderia pseudomallei—has been lurking in the Georgia area the entire time. They also think they know what triggered its recent reemergence: Hurricane Helene.
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