A 49-year-old father of two who presented to hospital with severe sepsis had unknowingly contracted an “extremely rare” and “aggressive” pathogen from his dog, an inquest has heard.
A sitting of Dublin District Coroner’s Court heard on Tuesday that Craig Jones, a taxi driver from Hartstown, Co Dublin had been experiencing fever, vomiting and bloody diarrhoea.
His wife Sandra recalled how her husband “thought he was hallucinating” while at a pub days before his death, adding that on arriving home from work in December 2022, she saw that he had turned “purple”.
She drove Mr Jones to Connolly Hospital, after she was informed that an ambulance would take more than three hours to arrive. On arrival, Mr Jones collapsed.
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Prof John McDermott, the consultant physician on call at the time, said it was uncommon to see purple discolouration on presentation, adding that Mr Jones had “very severe sepsis”.
Mr Jones, who had evolving organ failure, suffered six separate episodes of cardiac arrest during his short admission, he said.
All microbiology investigations carried out to ascertain the cause of his sepsis returned negative.
He was administered a broad spectrum of IV antibiotics. However, his condition deteriorated rapidly and he ultimately died from “overwhelming septic shock” on December 21st, the day after presenting.
Following his death, Prof Eoghan O’Neill, consultant microbiologist at Connolly Hospital, sent a sample to the UK Health Security Agency for a specialist PCR test not yet routinely available in Ireland.
The test returned positive for capnocytophaga canimorsus, which he said is commonly present in the mouths of dogs and cats but “extremely rarely implicated” in sepsis cases.
“This is an extremely rare infection,” he said, adding that infections arise in between 0.5 and one per million.
Family members told coroner Dr Cróna Gallagher that Mr Jones had a beagle dog that he “loved”, which would often lick him affectionately.
Mr Jones’ “severe psoriasis” was the most probable route, after a large ulcer attributed to the skin condition was discovered on his leg.
“It’s a very aggressive bug, and when it gets into the bloodstream, it has a very high mortality rate of 30 per cent,” Prof O’Neill said.
Although the antibiotics administered would have covered the capnocytophaga canimorsus, Mr Jones’ sepsis was too progressed to respond.
Mr Jones’ was at an increased risk of infection as his immune system would have been “relatively suppressed” due to both a splenectomy some two decades prior and a drug he was for psoriasis, called Stelara.
Coroner Dr Cróna Gallagher described Mr Jones’ case as “so rare and so unusual” and returned a narrative verdict, encompassing the pathogen from his dog, the splenectomy, his psoriasis and the psoriasis drug.
