An otherwise healthy 66-year-old woman in the U.K. had to have her already replaced hip swapped out for a new one after a scratch on her hand from her dog lead to an extremely rare infection.
After experiencing pain in her groin area for several months, the anonymous patient went to her orthopedist who ran tests and was unable to discover the source of her discomfort.
"All this time, the pain was becoming worse, and I was becoming increasingly frightened by what might actually be happening to me," the woman said in a study published in the journal BMJ Case Reports.
A second biopsy — 14 months after her pain began — revealed a strain of unknown bacteria that her doctors sent to a microbiology specialist lab at Cardiff University for further study. At this point, the patient was in self-described "horrendous pain" and new X-ray results showed significant damage done to the hip end of her femur from the unknown infection.
Her doctors used a technique called 16S PCR — a bacteria detector — and finally discovered the source of the contagion to be Capnocytophaga canimorsus, a type of infection that's only been recorded twice before in prosthetics. C. canimorsus is the primary bacteria found in dog bites and is present in about 25% of canine mouths, the study noted. It can cause meningitis, endocarditis and severe infections if left untreated.
The woman then recalled that her dog accidentally scratched the back of her had roughly nine months before she first approached her doctors about her pain, leading them to assume that the sole scratch lead to her entire ordeal. A course of antibiotics was enough to kill the infection but the patient had to undergo a second hip replacement to fully eradicate the effected prosthetic and has since made a full recovery.
"(But) the worry never goes away," she said. "The fear that something similar could happen again is always at the forefront of my mind."