Late-onset posttraumatic skin and soft-tissue infections caused by rapid-growing mycobacteria in tsunami survivors.

Background: In the tsunami catastrophe in Thailand in 2004, several thousand Swedish tourists were injured, with contaminated crush trauma of the legs being the main cause of injury among the survivors.

Methods: Patient and laboratory data for those who received hospital care in Stockholm and Gothenburg and contracted late-onset infections due to rapid-growing mycobacteria were reviewed retrospectively. Also, concomitant infections were recorded.

Concomitant late soft tissue infections by Cladophialophora bantiana and Mycobacterium abscessus following tsunami injuries.

A Swedish man and woman sustained severe soft tissue injuries during the tsunami catastrophe in Thailand in December 2004, and subsequently received partial thickness skin grafts after multiple surgical revisions. Four to six weeks post trauma they displayed signs of purulent infections in the non-traumatized, virtually intact skin outside the resection margins. Skin biopsies revealed granulomatous reactions and pigmented fungal hyphae were observed in specimens from the male patient.

A prospective study of infections in burn patients.

In a 3-year prospective study, all infections presenting in the burns unit of a university hospital were registered in a specially designed database. Two-hundred and thirty adult patients were included. Eighty-three patients had in all 176 infections, giving an infection rate of 48 per 1000 patient days including both nosocomial and community-acquired infections.