Infectionist Malyshev told why people get sick with anthrax in Russia

In Chuvashia, two cases of anthrax were identified, and Rospotrebnadzor immediately issued a memo on the prevention of this terrible disease transmitted to people from livestock. Of course, neither the threat of an epidemic, nor even a large-scale outbreak is out of the question, and yet foci of anthrax among cattle in the country occur with enviable regularity, and almost never without infecting people.

At the recent XII Congress of the All-Russian Society of Epidemiologists, Microbiologists and Parasitologists, the main reason why this infection has not yet been defeated was announced: private traders simply do not vaccinate their cattle.

As employees of the Stavropol Anti-Plague University told during the Congress, today anthrax is globally distributed and is a serious problem for veterinary medicine and public health in many countries. Only in our country there are more than 35 thousand settlements with foci where outbreaks of anthrax have been detected since the end of the 19th century. The most endemic federal districts are the North Caucasian and Siberian.

The head of the local Ministry of Health Vladimir Stepanov announced the identification of two cases of anthrax in people in Chuvashia. Both patients are hospitalized, receiving treatment, and according to doctors, their condition is stable (moderate severity), and the prognosis is favorable. All people who came into contact with them were covered with prophylaxis. It is reported that the infection occurred when butchering a bull, the meat of which the owner had already managed to sell to unidentified persons. The animal, in turn, became ill due to contaminated commercial feed.

Anthrax is a particularly dangerous bacterial infection. As noted in Rospotrebnadzor, the anthrax pathogen Bacillus anthracis can form spores that are resistant in the environment, which can survive for many years in soil, water, and persist in plants. People become infected with this infection mainly from sick farm animals: cows, horses, donkeys, sheep, goats, deer, camels, as well as through unheated meat and milk. In animals, the disease is usually acute. It is characterized by a sharp increase in temperature, refusal to feed, swelling of the head and neck.

If contact with an infected animal was superficial, a person develops a local form of the disease, which manifests itself in the form of skin ulcers. “Skin forms can also be after the bites of some insects, for example, gadflies. There is even a version that mosquitoes can also transmit anthrax. But the infection is not transmitted from person to person, ”the well-known infectious disease doctor, Professor Nikolai Malyshev told MK. A more severe course of the disease in a generalized form, which affects the internal organs, develops mainly after eating the meat or blood of infected animals (symptoms are fever, chills, headache, severe weakness and pain in the lower back). Anthrax spores can be transmitted with dust from animal hair – with this option, there is a high risk of developing pulmonary or intestinal forms of the disease. In the pulmonary form, there are chest pains, shortness of breath, pneumonia; with intestinal – diarrhea, vomiting, flatulence. With the mildest and most common (95% of cases) cutaneous form, the prognosis is favorable, but if left untreated, the probability of death reaches 10%. But with the pulmonary form without treatment, people die already in 80% of cases (with treatment – about 45%).

“From time to time, we have isolated cases of anthrax in people,” continues Nikolai Malyshev. – People associated with agriculture and animal husbandry are most often infected. In Chuvashia, two infected people took part in butchering an animal. This suggests that household slaughter should only be carried out after a veterinary examination.

It often happens that the owners discover that the animal is ill with something – and they strive to kill it as soon as possible before it dies a natural death, and try to sell it.

Epidemiologists call the situation with anthrax in the country unstable: since 1996, outbreaks have been recorded in 6 federal districts. Half of the cases occurred in the south of the Russian Federation: the most frequent places of outbreaks were Stavropol and Dagestan. There were two outbreaks in Dagestan in 2022 alone.

Anthrax vaccines that prevent infection of animals have existed in the world for a long time, however, epidemiologists note that in recent years, immunization of livestock has been strictly carried out mainly only in organized farms. Private traders simply ignore this process, thereby increasing the risk of spreading the infection – vaccination of livestock against anthrax is not mandatory! Therefore, epidemiologists call the situation “deplorable.”

They note that in Russia there is no complete accounting of cattle at all (which complicates full vaccination coverage, primarily among private livestock. In addition, private farms practically do not comply with the rules for private slaughter established by veterinary services. There are no places for stamping out , biowaste is not disposed of, and practically all diseased animals that are registered in the country, as later epidemiological investigations show, were neither registered nor vaccinated.

“There is an uncontrolled forced slaughter of infected animals. And people are not sufficiently informed about the risk factors for infection,” epidemiologists say. Therefore, it is necessary to strengthen control over the registration and vaccination of dairy cows, as well as the introduction of compensation for slaughtered animals in the amount of market value, industry experts say.

Another problem is the numerous animal burial grounds throughout the country. Outbreaks among animals are territorially tied to soil foci, which are formed as a result of direct infection of the soil with the secretions of sick animals in pastures, in places of stall keeping of animals, in places of burial of corpses, and also occur by flushing and bringing spores to new territories with rain, melt and sewage waters . “At one time, they talked a lot about cattle burial grounds in the Moscow region, where there are a huge number of them – and they are quite dangerous. If they are torn apart, who knows what is there and who is there? But now the topic has lost its relevance, but the problem has remained,” warns Professor Malyshev.

In any case, experts categorically advise against buying meat from your hands: even if you subject it to intensive heat treatment, there is a risk of cutting yourself when cutting or inhaling spores, for example, when beating meat.

Professor Malyshev recalls that at one time they tried to use anthrax as a bioweapon, but nothing happened. Today it spreads mainly due to human frivolity and greed.