Melioidosis Definition, Signs & Symptoms: Latin America Plagued by Disease; Why This Bacteria is Deadlier Than Experts Believe

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The Latin America is plagued with some obscure but deadly disease. This may kill as many people as measles do. Last year, the casualties were close to 90,000. Unfortunately, only a few heard about it from physicians where the deaths occur.

So what's this disease? According to Science AAAS, this dreadful disease is known as melioidosis. This is caused by the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei, which typically lives in the soil. People and animals are at risk of being infected with this disease through skin abrasions or when inhaling contaminated dust or drinking contaminated water.

The microbe can lead to acute disease immediately or may lie dormant before exploding into a full-blown melioidosis decades later, a trait that once earned the nickname, "Vietnamese time bomb."

Melioidosis can manifest decades after infection and in many different ways such as an abscess, a fulminant blood infection with fever, headache and pain; or as a pulmonary infection with a cough and chest pain that is easy to confuse with tuberculosis.

What makes this difficult to treat is that melioidosis is resistant to antibiotics and half of the patients suffering from this disease died.

According to a new study, melioidosis is also known as Whitmore's disease. This has long been known to be endemic in parts of South and East Asia, the Pacific and northern Australia, Yahoo! News reported. However, the new analysis by a team of international researchers found out that the disease has reached across the swathes of South America and sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of Central America, southern Africa and the Middle East.

Science AAAS noted that there are also cases of melioidosis in Latin America. "Wherever people looked for the disease, they found it." "Brazil, India. It's the same story again and again," said Alfredo Torres, a microbiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston who was not involved in the study. In 2014, an investigation by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revealed that the disease is also endemic in parts of Puerto Rico.

The study stressed that 89,000 individuals out of the 165,000 people inflicted with melioidosis died from it in 2015. The casualties were as high as measles and even greater than leptospirosis and dengue.

"It kills many people and kills silently," said Direk Limmathurotsakul, head of Microbiology at MORU and co-author of the report.

"This study is important," said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. "It confirms a high number of global deaths, such that melioidosis ranks with visceral leishmaniasis as one of the leading causes of death by a neglected tropical disease."

According to Torres, melioidosis is so neglected that the disease is not even listed on the World Health Organization's list of neglected tropical diseases.

The study was published in Nature Microbiology.