ANDRZEJ KRAUZEWhen retired inventor and engineer Thomas Fritz decided 2 years ago to remove a dead crab apple tree from his Indiana property, it seemed like a simple enough project. The tree “wasn’t tall for a crab apple tree, maybe 10 to 12 feet. . . . I had the chain saw warmed up, [and] thought ‘I’ll take him out now,’” Fritz remembers. But as he was dragging some of the spiny branches away, the 71-year-old became ensnared and fell, spearing his hand.
“It was a pretty good-sized puncture—about the size of a number two yellow pencil,” noted Fritz, who had been a volunteer firefighter and took advantage of his EMT training to bind his wound before finishing his pruning. But when Fritz’s hand began to swell, his doctor drew some fluid and put him on a “cannon of antibiotics.”
Technicians at the local lab couldn’t identify the type of bacterium that had taken up residence in Fritz, so they sent a sample to ARUP Laboratories, a national pathology reference laboratory at the University of Utah. Scientists there quickly realized that the bacterium was unusual. A semiautomated instrument for identifying bacterial species had labeled it Escherichia coli, but experienced technicians suspected the bacterium was something else entirely, according ...
