A Florida man in his 70s contracted an extremely rare, life-threatening infection in his implanted defibrillator after eating a feral pig in 2017.
Before cooking and consuming the gift from a local hunter, the man remembers handling the raw meat with bare hands.
Experts suspect it was at this moment that he was unknowingly exposed to a sneaky bacterium, Brucella suis.
Years later, the man began experiencing feverish symptoms, intermittent pain, excess fluid, and a hardening of the skin on the left side of his chest, according to a case study, led by infectious disease specialist Jose Rodriguez from the University of Florida.
When doctors finally figured out what was going on, the insidious bacterial infection had already slipped into the man’s defibrillator, passing through the chest wall, the left subclavian vein,…