HanoiAfter eating pig’s blood pudding at a restaurant, a 27-year-old man had malaria and shivered. When he was admitted to the hospital, he was in a coma. Doctors discovered he had streptococcus suis infection and was in critical condition.
On September 9, Dr. Pham Van Phuc, Deputy Head of the Intensive Care Unit, Central Hospital for Tropical Diseases, said that his family told him that he often had the habit of eating blood pudding for good luck. This time, the young man appeared tired, had body aches, and shivered with unknown temperature, after a day of consuming blood pudding.
Doctors diagnosed sepsis – meningitis, blood culture results, cerebrospinal fluid detected Streptococcus suis infection (bacteria causing swine streptococcus disease), complications of multiple organ failure, severe blood clotting disorder. The treatment team actively performed continuous blood filtration, and transfused blood products.
Streptococcus suis is a zoonotic disease, with no evidence of human-to-human transmission. Most cases are related to slaughtering, eating raw blood pudding or other undercooked foods. Some cases do not eat blood pudding or slaughter pigs but still get sick. The cause is eating raw infected pork, or coming into contact with infected pigs through skin lesions or scratches during processing.
Streptococcus suis bacteria are completely destroyed when food is thoroughly cooked. Therefore, to prevent the disease, people should not slaughter sick or dead pigs, and should not handle raw meat without protective gloves, especially when there are wounds.
Blood pudding has many potential risks of causing disease. Illustration photo: Thuy Quynh
People infected with streptococcus suis may develop sepsis, purulent meningitis, or a combination of both. Depending on the type, the disease can progress to mild or severe, with some cases being severely infected from the start.
The incubation period can be from a few hours to 4-5 days, depending on each person’s constitution. Symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, but not frequent, which can easily be mistaken for common digestive disorders or food poisoning.
Patients also have symptoms of headache, tinnitus, deafness, stiff neck, lethargy, and necrotic rashes on the skin due to sepsis and purulent meningitis.
The disease is treated with antibiotics, long-term, combined with blood filtration, respiratory and circulatory support. Patients with purulent meningitis may need to be treated for at least three weeks, and patients with sepsis may need to be treated for up to two months, costing hundreds of millions of dong.
Doctors warn that patients can die if treatment is delayed. The mortality rate from streptococcal infection is about 7%. If the patient survives, the rate of sequelae is also very high, about 40%.