Woman Catches Life-Threatening Infection From Her Cat

A woman in Houston, Texas contracted a serious bacterial infection from her cat — a first in the history of the disease.

An unnamed 31-year-old patient, whose story is recounted in a recent article in the American Journal of Case Reports, went to the clinic having had a fever and diarrhea for a week. She had recently had a urinary tract infection that was treated with antibiotics, which can sometimes cause a bacteria called clostridium difficile — sometimes called C. diff —  to grow out of control and cause gastrointestinal symptoms. 

C. diff — sometimes referred to as a hospital “superbug” because it is also seen there — is a serious infection. If left untreated, or if it is a strain resistant to antibiotics, it can lead to the colon bursting, and it has also been linked to colon cancer. Besides these serious complications, it can also simply be incredibly painful and uncomfortable for the patient.

The patient in the case report tested positive for C. diff and was sent home with a course of antibiotics, which seemed to resolve her symptoms. 

However, two months later, she went to a clinic with the same symptoms again, this time including nausea, chills and abdominal pain, and she tested positive for the same bacteria again. A month later, still experiencing the symptoms, she asked a health care provider if a stray cat she had adopted — about a month before she first developed her symptoms — may have something to do with her symptoms. 

She took her cat to the veterinarian, where the cat also tested positive for C. diff and was given a course of antibiotics. The patient then confirmed that once the cat had been treated, her symptoms also abated, and she was no longer testing positive for C. diff. 

While this specific situation has never been described before, according to the study authors from the Houston Methodist Hospital, it has been previously hypothesized that animals could transmit the bacteria to humans. 

Additionally, while it is likely that this patient caught the bacteria from her cat, the genes of the bacteria found from her and from the cat weren’t analyzed in this study, so that concrete link can’t be identified.

The authors conclude that this case illuminates the importance of checking a patient’s past exposure to animals when they present with bacterial infections, as it provides evidence of a heretofore extremely uncommon transmission route of C. diff.