Bacterial infections are serious business. In the pre-antibiotic era, bacterial infections killed a lot of people. My Dad's younger brother died in 1928 of what was almost certainly a bacterial pneumonia, at three years of age, when today my Uncle Lee would never have been in any danger and would likely have lived a long and healthy life. That was an unfortunate fact of life before the introduction of penicillin, and later, other antibiotics.
Bacterial infections are still serious business, even so. In the north, including right there in the Great Land, there's a syndrome that results from a rare bacteria called seal finger, and it can be serious. Yes, really.
An Alaska doctor has documented the first case of a rare and potentially risky infection from contact with a brown bear. The infection is known as “seal finger” and people typically get it handling seals, especially during seal hunting and processing. Veterinarians and wildlife biologists are also at risk.
But in 2024, Dr. Benjamin Westley diagnosed the case in a man who had cut his hand skinning a brown bear hunted on the Alaska Peninsula. He’d had three days of redness and painful swelling that didn’t resolve with standard antibiotics.
Westley said early tests didn’t find anything definitive, so eventually he sent a tissue sample to a lab for more comprehensive analysis.
“What was particularly shocking about this patient was he had a finger infection after skinning a brown bear that was not responding properly to antibiotics,” Westley said. “But I did not expect this bacteria.”
Dr. Westley didn't expect it because it's generally only found in seals.
Seal finger is not uncommon in Alaska and circumpolar regions, but Westley said this is only the second time this potentially more serious strain of the infection has been identified in the state.
He diagnosed the first case too, in a patient whose finger infection had spread to his hip.
“When the report came back, I was shocked, because the first case was my own patient 10 years prior,” he said. “And now it was the exact same bacteria for the second time in Alaska, but from a brown bear exposure, not from a seal exposure.”
That's what makes this case a little unusual.
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The bacteria in question are only spread through direct or indirect contact; in the case of seals, it's usually during the processing of the animal for eating, which is still a common enough practice in the coastal native communities. And the thing is that this infection can often be misdiagnosed, due in part to its rarity, and it requires a specific antibiotic to get the bug beat down. The case mentioned above was treated with the wrong antibiotic at first, which resulted in serious damage to the patient's hand suffering permanent damage. And now we know that it's not only found in seals, but also in bears, and in at least one case, a cat. It's unclear how the species-jump happened, but happen it did.
So, if you're dressing out a seal - or a bear - for the table, wear gloves if you have any cuts or abrasions on your hands, and wash carefully before and after, because if there's anything you don't want, it's seal finger.
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