Florida Man Hospitalized With Rare Infection After Eating Feral Pig Meat

If you kill a feral pig, you probably shouldn’t eat it. This life lesson comes to us from yet another CDC case study. These studies occasionally veer into the outlandish, like the one about a guy who got a tick-related infection from a kidney transplant. And now, there’s a Florida man whose heart implant became infected after he ate some feral pig meat.

A pastor in his 70s developed a chronic illness that was eventually linked to a bacteria transmitted by pigs. Assuming the illness stemmed from his history of heart failure that was so severe that he needed to wear a cardiac defibrillator, he eventually saw a doctor who was mystified by his patient’s worsening infection even after receiving antibiotic treatments.

The poor guy was in and out of the hospital as doctors struggled to figure out what was going on. Eventually, doctors suspected that it had something to do with the cardiac defibrillator implanted in his chest to maintain a steady heartbeat.

The doctors theorized that maybe the infection couldn’t be eliminated no matter what kind of antibiotic treatment he received because the infection wasn’t so much inside of his body as it was trapped inside of his implant.

With no other options, they cut open his chest and removed the implant. As they suspected, they found traces of an infection called B. suis, a zoonotic disease that spreads through direct animal contact or the consumption of contaminated animal products.

The guy swore up and down that, even though he lived on a farm, he had no direct contact with any animals or animal products that are known to be harbingers of B. suis. Except, oops, wait, totally forgot about that time a hunter friend gave him a few slabs of feral pig meat.

Feral pigs happen to be one of the more common ways B. suis is transmitted, along with drinking raw milk.

The doctors were able to safely remove the defibrillator implant and he was finally rid of the infection after a standard round of antibiotics. A few months later, he had a new implant installed, one that wasn’t tainted by a rare feral pig infection.