Man loses legs and hands from infection from dog saliva

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Greg Manteufel’s symptoms began with fever and vomiting, as if he had the flu. But by the following morning, he was delirious, and his temperature had soared. His wife rushed him to the hospital, a quick drive from their Wisconsin home.
Once they arrived, Dawn Manteufel said she noticed bruises — several of them, all over his body — that weren’t there when they left their house just five minutes earlier. To Dawn, it was as if her husband had just been beaten with a baseball bat.

Within a week at the hospital, the 48-year-old who paints houses for a living and loves to ride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle lost his legs. And then his hands.

Greg Manteufel suffered a rare blood infection after harmful bacteria from a dog’s saliva seeped into his bloodstream, causing sepsis, or blood poisoning from bacteria. The sepsis resulted in blood spots that looked like bruises all over his body, particularly on his chest and face. Doctors pumped him with antibiotics to stop the infection, his wife said, but clots blocked the flow of blood to his extremities, causing tissue and muscles to die.

The bacteria, called Capnocytophaga canimorsus, “just attacked him,” Dawn said, and it did so quickly and aggressively. To save his life, doctors had to cut his legs from the knee down, and then his hands.

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