Brucellosis in Georgia Deer

[Bkeepr]

I am sorry you are having to go through this! It is a bad, bad bug that likes to hide in the bone marrow, be sure and take your antibiotics for the full course. Did the doc draw any blood cultures on you, or just do serology? IGM and IGG are two immunoglobulins that you produce to fight Brucella. IGM appears early in the illness and IGG appears later. If they could get the actual organism out of your blood cultures, then it could (maybe) be identified to species. Even that can be difficult. In the conventional method of identification you test to see what sugars, amino acids and other substrates the organism can utilize, like urea. It is slightly different for each species of Brucella. But sometimes the bugs don't follow the book. There are other methods like DNA testing but sometimes that doesn't work so great either.

I knew another tech that got Brucella from handling it on a culture plate on an open lab bench. They didn't know it was Brucella at the time, it grew faster than usual. She got all the symptoms and it turned up in her blood cultures. She had to go to the infusion clinic daily for IV amikacin which affected her balance.

 

[dick7.62]

I had bad reaction doxycycline, I was given doxycycline as precaution against lyme disease. I broke out in hives and my blood pressure went very high.

I wonder if they have a way to treat me for brucellosis.

Although doxycycline with rifampin is the preferred treatment, some others are effective. Gentomycin, streptomycin and TMP-SMZ are also used. Google brucellosis treatment for more information.