This seems more like an act of desperation than an actual emergency.

Rising temperatures have manifested in conspicuous manners along the East Coast, including storms and wildfires. But a new threat has been flying under the radar and is impossible to detect by the naked eye: flesh-eating bacteria.

The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published last February found that seven people from North Carolina and two people from New York and Connecticut became severely infected with Vibrio vulnificus last July and August.

The waterborne and foodborne pathogen lives in coastal waters and can lead to necrotizing fasciitis — an infection in which tissue dies — if exposed to an open wound. Consumption of the bacteria via raw or undercooked seafood can lead to sepsis and gastrointestinal issues like watery diarrhea, vomiting, and fever.

The CDC suspected that six of the patients contracted the illness after having a wound exposed to marine or estuarine water. Two other patients had a cut on their hands when handling raw seafood as part of food preparation. Of the last two patients who provided exposure information, both ate raw oysters, while one had a wound exposed to brackish water. The ages of the afflicted patients ranged from 37 to 84.

While what happened to the patients involved is horrifying, the spread of the disease is increasing rapidly and, not surprisingly, is being attributed to climate change. Forms of life (including and especially bacterias) often can spread exponentially. But it is irresponsible to link outbreaks of such horrible conditions to climate change due to all of the other doom-and-gloom predictions that have previously not come true.

There are many versions of flesh-eating bacteria and the threat they can pose is enough to warrant people to take appropriate, preventable actions. An effort by the CDC to link flesh-eating viruses to climate change is clearly geared to gain politically possibly due to the agency’s funding being at risk.

PHOTO CREDIT: By Piotr Smuszkiewicz, Iwona Trojanowska and Hanna Tomczak – Late diagnosed necrotizing fasciitis as a cause of multiorgan dysfunction syndrome: A case report. Cases Journal 2008, 1:125. doi:10.1186/1757-1626-1-125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5639655