Troy Jeffries had just got home to Melbourne from a trip through Thailand when he noticed the little red dots on his shoulder. At first, he shrugged them off as a spider bite. But the next day, he was exhausted – and he could barely raise his arm.
“I was normally at the gym every day,” he says. “Still, the GP brushed me off. He told me to just go home, have an aspirin, and a nap. So, I did what you did then: I had a rant on Facebook about it.”
Among his friends who took notice was pandemic-famous epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett.
Superbug researcher and epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett saved her friend Troy Jeffries from a superbug when she read something weird about his shoulder in a Facebook conversation.Credit: Joe Armao
“We were always playing [the game] Words with Friends together and I noticed he was off,” says Bennett of Deakin University.
“Poor word choices,” Jeffries quips.
“Another friend had asked if the [fatigue] was to do with the ‘weird thing’ on Troy’s shoulder but he replied ‘that was just a spider bite’ and instantly my antennas went up,” Bennett says.
Before she helped Melbourne weather the COVID storm, Bennett spent years researching superbugs– germs resistant to medicine. She knew that some nasty varieties, including golden staph, could look like a bite or even a pimple but quickly spiral into sepsis as the bug burrowed in and abscesses formed under the skin.
“She started asking me questions,” recalls Jeffries. “And then she called and said, ‘I’ve consulted with clinicians at the Austin and booked you an appointment with their specialists. You need to go right now.’ I remember asking, ‘Can I just finish hanging up the washing’?”
But Bennett was worried Jeffries’ body was already shutting down. He lived alone and if he fell asleep, he might wake up paralysed. “Or not wake up,” she says.
The hospital confirmed Bennett’s suspicions: Jeffries had a rare superbug, a strain of staph bacteria known to eat through the skin. It had formed abscesses all through his shoulder. If he’d stayed home and slept after visiting the doctor, he might be dead.
“Troy had just been overseas. But, really he could have picked it up anywhere,” says Bennett.
“It’s like The Day of The Triffids. They’re everywhere, the monsters among us. Eighty per cent of people are colonised with staph at some point in their life.”
The bacteria usually don’t cause problems – humans have lived with all sorts of germs for millennia. But Bennett says dangerous variants are now being seen in the community more and more.
“Before that, the concern was more in hospitals – if you had a cut already or you’d just had surgery.”
Fifteen years ago, Bennett began long-term research into Melbourne households where someone had a staph infection to track how the germ spread and why it might cause problems for some but not others. In more than two-thirds of cases, the staph infection did spread – once someone had it, 50 per cent of the household were likely to be colonised, often via shared towels, soap, clothing and sheets. But not everyone got sick.
“Unsurprisingly, it was couples, or a parent and child, sharing most items … and staph,” says Bennett, though she adds handwashing has been found to be protective.
Now she is drawing on that large store of data to work with Danish researchers analysing how multiple strains may colonise someone at once, and whether natural protective layers in the skin and nose might guard against infection for some.
“We’ve all been distracted by COVID, including me,” says Bennett. “But it’s important people, and GPs, remember there are other bugs out there.
“A little mark on the skin can be just the tip of the iceberg. Maybe it’s been on you for a while, even in your gut, without causing problems until now. Or maybe you’ve been sick and just can’t shake it. But things can go downhill very quickly.”
Superbugs kill hundreds of Australians each year, including a 29-year-old woman in NSW recently.
Fortunately, in Jeffries’s case, doctors analysing the germ under his skin found an antibiotic to fight it, but he spent weeks in hospital.
“I’m not a clinician so it was just wonderful to see my research be so useful to someone I know,” says Bennett.
“She saved my life,” adds Jeffries. ”Before that, I thought I was invincible. It was a wake-up call.
“Catherine sent me flowers in hospital, and then as soon as I got out, I sent her some. But I never did get the washing done. I had to wash my undies in the hospital room sink.”
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