Typhus hospitalization prompts flea warning in San Diego County
A local typhus case that recently put a North Park woman in the hospital underlines the importance of making sure that household pets are flea free.
After she was diagnosed with a case of the rare bacterial infection, the woman, who was not identified by the county Health and Human Services Agency, reported that she remembered being bitten by fleas in her home. She also had an indoor-outdoor cat.
Pets that have access to the outdoors can come into contact with fleas that feed on rats, opossums and other animals known to be nature’s reservoirs of murine typhus which, in humans, causes a range of symptoms including headache, fever, chills, rash, dry cough, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.
Bites don’t directly cause infection, but if flea droppings end up coming into contact with the wounds caused during the parasitic feeding process, then rickettsia typhi, the bacteria that causes murine typhus, can end up in the human bloodstream.
It’s unclear exactly how many cases of typhus occur in the United States each year because the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not require doctors and local health departments to report individual cases when they occur. The public health department reports that it detects about one typhus case per year in San Diego County.
If caught early enough, typhus infection is treatable with antibiotics, and that was the case for the North Park woman who was hospitalized in May. A Medscape study states that the mortality rate for patients treated for murine typhus is between 1 percent and 4 percent.
In a statement issued Friday, Dr. Sayone Thihalolipavan, the county’s deputy public health officer, said the typhus case is a reminder to pet owners that fleas can be more than a nuisance.
“Keeping fleas off your pets and out of your homes is the best prevention for murine typhus,” Thihalolipavan said.
Fleas, said Chris Conlan, the county’s supervising vector ecologist, “tend to be more common in summer as they can mature faster in warmer weather.”
The number of fleas across the region this spring, he added, could have something to do with recent weather patterns.
“We did have pretty warm weather back in January and February, so that may have played a part,” Conlan said.
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paul.sisson@sduniontribune.com
(619) 293-1850
Twitter: @paulsisson
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