An Extraordinary Wet Season and a Surge of Melioidosis: A Retrospective Case Series From a Tropical Emergency Department
Colin Banks, Amanda McConnell, Christopher S Heather, Maisie Stephen, Kristen‐Jürgen Schroeder, Isaac Tredinnick, Shannon Wong, Vinay Gangathimmaiah · 2026
Read An Extraordinary Wet Season and a Surge of Melioidosis: A Retrospective Case Series From a Tropical Emergency Department by Colin Banks, Amanda McConnell, Christopher S Heather, Maisie Stephen, Kristen‐Jürgen Schroeder, Isaac Tredinnick, Shannon Wong, Vinay Gangathimmaiah (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/PMC13439333.txt.
Description
Banks and colleagues describe a surge of a tropical bacterial disease during record rains in this 2026 case series. Melioidosis, caused by a soil bacterium, spikes after heavy rainfall in northern Australia. Townsville's 2024-2025 wet season brought record rain and a wave of cases. The team reviewed all confirmed patients who first came to the hospital's emergency department. The window ran from November 2024 to April 2025.
Fifty-seven patients presented, forty men and seventeen women, and nearly nine in ten carried a risk factor, most commonly diabetes, present in about 47 percent of the group overall. Blood cultures grew the bacterium in two-thirds of those tested, lungs were involved in about four-fifths, and one in five patients needed intensive care. Eight patients, about fourteen percent, died in hospital despite treatment.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Colin Banks, Amanda McConnell, Christopher S Heather, Maisie Stephen, Kristen‐Jürgen Schroeder, Isaac Tredinnick, Shannon Wong, Vinay Gangathimmaiah |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 19 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |