Risk of serious infections
A dog poop made truck drivers ill for life
Such a meadow is tempting. But if you let your dog do its business without putting it away afterwards, you risk the health of people and animals.
© Jens Büttner / Picture Alliance
Dog poop isn’t just a nuisance — it can make people seriously ill. A particularly bad case has occurred in Wales.
It’s usually only seconds that can change a life forever. For British truck driver Darryl Adams, it was a single moment during a rugby match in 2005. A team-mate kicked his shin during the match. Nothing unusual in playing rugby – but in this case it had serious health consequences.
Because there was dog feces on the cleats of the rugby shoe. Apparently someone had simply left their four-legged friend’s legacy on the pitch in Blaenau Gwent, around 60 kilometers north of Cardiff, while going for a walk, a player ran into the dog faeces – and then stepped on Darryl Adams’ shin with the same shoe.
Pathogens in dog faeces – this rugby match had dire consequences
The shoe’s cleats dug into Adams’ skin – and that’s how his tale of woe began. He contracted severe cellulitis from dog faeces, a bacterial infection that has been making life difficult for him for the past 17 years. Because the Welshman’s leg keeps getting inflamed. He will probably never get rid of this disease.
The medical history of the now 50-year-old can currently be read in the media in Wales in order to draw attention to the “National Dog Fouling Campaign”, an action intended to encourage dog owners to always dispose of the legacies of their animals hygienically. Because dog excrement poses a number of dangers – both for animals if they eat contaminated grass, for example, and for people if they become infected with pathogens from the excrement.
Darryl Adams’ now 17-year ordeal is also told with drastic photos showing a badly inflamed, partly red leg that brought him to the hospital several times. The leg was “never okay again” after the infection, he summarizes more than a decade and a half after that fateful kick while playing rugby.
A doctor at the clinic told him the cellulite would never go away. On the contrary – smaller triggers would trigger the painful inflammation again and again. And so it happened. “A severe flu was enough – and the disease broke out again,” Adams told local media. Between 2005 and 2013, the infection broke out again and again, the youngest was also the most severe.
The truck driver has been suffering from the pathogens in dog excrement for 17 years
His leg has looked awful and swollen constantly for 17 years. “And all because some egoist didn’t feel like cleaning up his dog’s pile.”
How much risk emanates from dog excrement is now shown by numerous studies that have identified a number of different pathogens such as worms and unicellular parasites. Small children or immunocompromised, elderly people can become particularly ill from the pathogens.
However, the example of the truck driver from Wales shows that even an athletic man in his early 30s can be marked for life by an illness caused by dog excrement
Swell: “Liverpool Echo“, “CheshireLive“, ScienceXX
You can find more health topics in our podcast: A woman loses her sense of smell. As more symptoms appear, the situation worsens. In an interview, Dr. Anika Geisler, host of the podcast “Die Diagnose”, insights into the cases of illness in the new season.