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New Orleans woman contracts flesh-eating bacteria in Gulf of Mexico | AL.com

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New Orleans woman contracts flesh-eating bacteria in Gulf of Mexico

A New Orleans woman contracted a flesh-eating bacteria at Grand Isle on the Gulf of Mexico, according to WDSU News.
Kelly Kohen Blomberg contracted vibrio vulnificus when she was surf fishing off of the beach on May 12. She said that she was walking in the water, she accidentally put her foot into a fish's mouth and it bit her.
She went to the hospital and began taking antibiotics the day after the accident, WDSU reported.
"A week later, my foot was still huge and I'm starting to have, like, dead tissue around my foot so I'm just worried," she said.
Blomberg has undergone surgery to remove dead tissue in her foot and received a skin graft.
"If you have an open wound and you go into the salt water off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf, you can be exposed to this bacteria. The other way is by eating raw oysters," Dr. Obinna Nnedu, an infectious disease doctor at Ochsner Medical Center, said.
He added that people with liver disease, weak immune systems, and high amounts of iron are more susceptible to serious effects from the bacteria.
"These individuals are at very high risk of death when they get infected with this organism. Anyone can get infected, but that subset of people can potentially have very serious outcomes," he told the station.
Nnedu said to prevent the infection, wear shoes and other protective gear while surf fishing and be careful while handling fish hooks. Also, he said, consider staying out of the water if you have an open wound.

Always a concern of mine, especially with my small kids and their lack of understanding about things on the seafloor (they aren't very good at the sting ray shuffle yet!). When I was a kid, whenever we would cut ourselves at the beach (which was amazingly easy to do on the rocky shores of Maine) my mom would MAKE us get in the salt water to clean out the cut. Guess that works better in the cold ocean waters of Maine vs. the warm Gulf waters, or we just got lucky.

My mother was big into adverse conditioning too, except instead of salt water she used Mercurochrome. That's right -- toxic heavy metal solution right into open cuts.