The rise of flesh-eating bacteria is a true Florida horror story

Happy Halloween, everybody! I wonder how many trick-or-treaters tonight will be dressed as hurricanes, or maybe as debris piles. Maybe us grownups should dress up as FEMA officials, handing out candy instead of disaster aid.

This holiday is all about facing our fears. Although I have to say, in all my years living here, I’ve never seen anyone dressed as the scariest thing in Florida, which is a flying cockroach.

Anyway, in the spirit of this day for spirits, let me confess to you one of my greatest fears, the thing that haunts my nightmares:

Vibrio vulnificus.

In the logical part of my brain, I know that Vibrio is a minor concern compared to other life-threatening things we constantly face here, like lightning strikes (we’re No. 1 in the U.S. for those) or shark bites (we’re No. 1 in the world — sorry, Australia.).

But every time I see a headline about Vibrio — commonly called “flesh-eating bacteria” — I can’t help but shudder. It conjures up images from “Night of the Living Dead,” with zombies (sloooowly) walking the earth, their skin falling off.

Now it turns out we’re No. 1 in this, too.

“In the U.S., Florida has the highest number of vibriosis cases, and most infections are reported in the summer months when water temperatures are the warmest and rainfall is the highest,” a publication called The Scientist reported last week.

Flooding from hurricanes provides the perfect brackish habitat for the bacteria. Shortly after Helene and Milton hit, The Scientist reported, the Florida Department of Health disclosed “an increase in cases of vibriosis. … As of October 25, 2024, there have been 77 cases and 15 deaths, up from 46 cases and 11 deaths in 2023.”

USA Today confirms this: “Florida has seen a surge of flesh-eating bacteria cases in recent weeks after parts of the state were inundated with heavy rain and flooding due to back-to-back hurricanes, according to state health department data.”

That story noted how deadly the infections can be: “About one in five people die from this infection, sometimes within one to two days of becoming ill.”

But wait, I haven’t told you the scariest part yet.

A 2023 study found that “infections in Florida increased by five-fold between 1992 and 2022.”

In other words, this dangerous situation keeps getting worse and worse.

Turns out this is one of the many side-effects of that double c-word the governor and Legislature don’t want us to talk about.

As one of my friends likes to say: “Florida — because it’s easier to spell than ‘apocalypse.’”

It merely kills you

OK, now that I’ve made your hair stand on end (I’m bald, so that’s not a problem for me), let me reassure you about one thing:

“Flesh eating bacteria” is a misnomer. It does not, in fact, consume human flesh.

Kill people? Yes, Gobble their skin? No.

Everyone feel better now?

Here’s the way the University of Florida’s Florida Sea Grant explains it: Vibrio refers to a large group of marine bacteria, most of which are harmless and even beneficial. But roughly 15 species are known to infect humans, either through contaminating seafood or us.

“Because of Florida’s warm climate, Vibrio are present in brackish waters year-round,” the Sea Grant publication says. “They are most abundant from April to November when the water is the warmest. People are also more likely to participate in water activities during these months. The combination of these factors contributes to a peak in reported cases during the summer.”

If you were to follow the advice of Sweet Honey in the Rock and “wade in the water, children,” you’d be fine — unless you have a cut on, say, your leg. Then the bacteria can infect you. Here’s how the Sea Grant experts describe the symptoms:

“Infections typically begin with swelling and redness of skin, followed by severe pain, blistering, and discharge at the site of the wound. As the infection progresses, tissue necrosis, fever, chills, low blood pressure, shock, and death may occur, especially if the infection spreads to the bloodstream.”

Well, that is MUCH better than having it eat your flesh, right?

By the way, “tissue necrosis” is not just a cool name for a heavy metal band. It’s also a medical term for “cells in living tissue dying prematurely.” But at least they’re not being eaten.

When I checked the website for the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, I found that even one of UF’s own experts on the disease had contracted it.

Paul Gulig forgot he had a small cut on his foot and went swimming in the Gulf of Mexico off Pensacola. Within days, he told me, he experienced diarrhea. Then the cut on his foot became increasingly sensitive. He went to the ER, thinking he’d stepped on some glass.

The doctors detected Gulig’s infection in time to treat it with antibiotics. The bottom line here, he said, is, “I didn’t follow my own advice: If you have a cut, don’t go in the water.”

Now we’re seeing these once-rare cases proliferate and spread. No less an authority than the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says that “increases in Vibrio abundance were related to changes in climate patterns.” That’s in a 2018 press release headlined, “Bacteria Thrive as Ocean Warms.”

But the governor says we shouldn’t worry about that.

Scary combos

One of the people I called about this was Mia McCormick of Environment Florida. Back in July, when we were suffering through record high temperatures, she sent out a press release headlined “5 scary facts about Florida heat waves.”

The list included such frightening items as more powerful storms, coral bleaching, and an increase in fatal heat strokes.

The second item on her list: “Increase in flesh-eating bacteria.”

Turns out she shares my phobia about this nasty stuff.

“When I was growing up in Florida,” she told me, “my mom always said, ‘Don’t swim in the lake.’ But I wasn’t scared of gators and snakes.”

Vibrio, she said, was another story: “That’s pretty scary.”

What’s even scarier, she said, is that, according to that same 2023 study I mentioned earlier, the Vibrio bacteria in the water can bond with plastic pollution to become a more widespread, long-lasting threat.

This, of course, conjured up memories of seeing “The Thing with Two Heads.” But this is even worse than pairing up Ray Milland and Rosie Grier in one big, ugly body, thanks to Helene and Milton.

“Think of all the plastic debris that just went into the water because of the hurricanes,” McCormick said.

Vibrio can also combine with smelly sargassum seaweed. Fortunately, none of that stuff is floating around Florida — yet.

Yet nobody’s really doing anything about it beyond warning the public to be wary of contamination in flood waters.

That’s sort of like telling everyone in “Friday the 13th” to do their best to avoid the maniac in the hockey mask, instead of just bulldozing every building at Camp Crystal Lake so nobody dies.

“The question,” McCormick said, “is how long our political leaders will wait before they do something. We need to get out in front of this.”

But I’m not sure they’re going to do anything. Not the ones in office now, that is.

The same pattern

The story in The Scientist quoted an actual scientist named Gabby Barbarite-McHenry. She works for Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute. She’s been studying vibrio for a loooong time.

“During graduate school, Barbarite-McHenry’s research focused on fishermen who were exposed to the pathogen in the Indian River Lagoon,” the publication reported.

Every case followed precisely the same pattern, she said.

“They got up really early, they went fishing, they had a cut, they got exposed, they went home and took a nap, and by the time they woke up, they were needing to go to the hospital, and it was too late for treatment,” she told The Scientist.

Yep, no nightmare fuel there! No sir!

I called Barbarite-McHenry up to talk about this, and she was much calmer about the situation than I was.

“These bacteria are naturally occurring,” she told me. She compared them to the other natural hazards we routinely face in Florida, such as rip currents. (She didn’t mention the traffic on Interstate 4, the deadliest highway in America, but we probably could include that too.)

She confirmed the effect that climate change is having on the spread of the bacteria, because the sea surface’ temperatures this summer hit almost 91 degrees.

“They like warm water,” she said. “And the warmer it is, the more of them you have.”

She confirmed the part about the sufferers she used to see the most.

“The victims were often men, they were often older and they had some underlying medical condition that made them vulnerable,” she told me.

Their wound could be a minor one before it became infected, she said.

“We had one fisherman who’d stepped in an anthill and then he scratched his foot where they bit him, and then he stepped where the bacteria was.”

Just because you encounter the bacteria doesn’t mean you’ll be infected, she told me.

“We screened 600 individuals, and half had it on their bodies,” she said. But unless they ate contaminated seafood (raw oysters, for instance) or had a cut that allowed the bacteria inside the body, they faced no infection.

Still, she said, infections are easy to prevent. To avoid Vibrio, clean out and treat any cut before you enter the water. Put on a waterproof bandage. Or avoid the water altogether.

Yet there are people who don’t heed that simple advice — and they die.

Duly elected do-nothings

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Florida has spent the past decade-plus under the control of politicians who don’t want to lift a finger to fight climate change.

It started in 2011 with former governor, now Sen. Rick “I Blame the Hurricanes for My Debate Cowardice” Scott. Despite owning a waterfront mansion in Naples, he didn’t even want to hear the words, much less try to prevent climate change.

Then came our sitting governor, Ron “Now I Want to Prosecute Doctors” DeSantis. He has wavered on the climate question. First, he claimed it was just “left-wing stuff” and wanted nothing to do with it. Then he said climate change is real, but the best solution is to burn more fossil fuels.

Lately, he’s returned to sneering at the science as “climate ideology” and repeating wildly erroneous talking points he must have heard from his fossil fuel donors.

Meanwhile, however, he’s been willing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on “resilience” to help waterfront property owners cope with rising seas. That includes such projects as pump stations, seawalls, drainage ditches, and the occasional “living shoreline” that restores vanished mangroves.

“Resilience,” in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is the word politicians use when they mean “climate change is an opportunity for me to hand out big-dollar government contracts for construction work that will have to be repeated over and over.”

But resilience doesn’t do diddly-squat about all the other things that climate change causes.

That includes the rapidly intensifying hurricanes such as we experienced with Matthew, Ian, Idalia, Helene, and Milton. It includes brutal heat waves and the explosion of toxic algae blooms and “rain-bombs.” Those heavy rains lead to other consequences, such as the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue fever.

Then there are the OTHER other consequences, such as ocean acidification and the fact that our beaches wash away much more quickly. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Now it turns out climate change spreads Vibrio, too. But still our duly elected do-nothings couldn’t be bothered to act. They’d rather pretend everything is peachy and we can keep living the way we always have.

I love my state, warts and all, but I’m sick of our “leaders” turning a blind eye to things that increase the risk of living here. Their devotion to the needs of the fossil fuel industry over our safety is so scary, it makes my skin crawl.

Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on Facebook and X.