Friday, November 23, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving

A 30 year old man returns from a trip to Turkey where he visited some relatives on a farm. He presented to his local hospital a few days ago with a pneumonia: fever, cough, shortness of breath, headache, myalgia, and sore throat. The respiratory distress got worse and was soon accompanied by diarrhea. The referring hospital could not identify the etiology of the pneumonia; all the usual suspects were tested and negative. Radiographic findings show diffuse bilateral ground-glass infiltrates, which signifies very poor prognosis.

Infections by this bug have also been documented in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, China, Azerbaijan, Laos, Djibouti, Egypt, Nigeria, and Iraq.

Challenge: This is an unfortunately nonspecific presentation, but give a guess for the causative organism.

2 comments:

Alex said...

is the "organism" asbestos

Craig said...

Happy Thanksgiving

This is avian flu (H5N1 influenza).

Source: UpToDate.