The southern end of the Yuntai Mountains, Cloud Farm.

Gu Yanan and Xiao Chu found the farmer of Cloud Farm and showed their work cards.

The farmer looked surprised, with a little fear in his eyes, and asked, "Why did you come to my farm?" Have an infectious disease on my farm? No, my farm is fine, no one gets sick. ”

Gu Yanan explained his intentions, "Last weekend, the employees of Angel Animation Company came to your cloud farm for team building, and several of them were injured during the event, infected with Clostridium tetani, and now they are sick and are being treated in the hospital. ”

"Tetanus?!" The farmer whispered a few times in his mouth, as if he suddenly remembered something, and asked urgently: "You disease control and control don't care about the livestock affairs, and a few horses on my farm are sick, will they also have tetanus as you say?" ”

Tetanus is a zoonotic disease.

Clostridium tetani can infect both humans and livestock.

If someone is infected on a farm, then it is possible for livestock.

"We take care of everything in disease control, where are the sick horses? Take us to see it. ”

In the cloud farm, there is a horse pen.

There were only two horses in the stable, lying listless in it.

The horses usually move standing up, even when they sleep, but now the two horses are lying in the stable, and they look sick.

The farmer stood outside the horse pen and explained to Gu Yanan and Xiao Chu, "Some time ago, the horse's hooves were pierced by iron nails, I pulled out the iron nails, and also detoxified the wounds, and it was fine at the beginning, but after more than ten days, the horse began to dislike to eat forage, and the horse's limbs began to twitch the day before yesterday. To make matters worse, yesterday another horse had the same symptoms as the previous one, he didn't like to eat, he couldn't stand on his limbs, I thought it might be an infectious disease, so I kept the two horses in this stable. ”

"Did the horse that got sick have any injuries on him?" Gu Yanan asked.

"I've checked that the horse's hooves have not been pierced with iron nails." The farmer was both questioning and worried, and asked Gu Yanan, "Doctor, do you think this is an infectious disease?" Will this disease infect other horses on my farm? ”

"If it's tetanus, it's not spread through contact between horses, and it can only get sick if the horse is infected with a trauma."

If both horses are tetanus infected, then the second horse must have a wound on the body, and Gu Yanan personally entered the stables to check on the condition of the second horse.

The sick horse's ears are erect, the eyes are half-open, the teeth are closed, the pupils are dilated, the nostrils are open, the tail is raised, the abdomen is curled, and the limbs are as stiff as a wooden horse.

This is a symptom of typical tetanus.

A closer examination of the limbs of the sick horse revealed that there were no wounds on the limbs, as the farmer had said.

Examining the rest of the horse's body showed that there appeared to be a swelling in the area of thick hair on the outside of the jaw.

"Xiao Chu, bring alcohol and tweezers."

Xiao Chu hurriedly opened the sampling box, took out alcohol and tweezers from it and handed them to Gu Yanan.

Gu Yanan first disinfected the swelling with alcohol, and then used tweezers to pinch out a long, blackened wooden thorn in the center of the swelling.

"The horse was pricked in the jaw by a wooden thorn, and judging by the wound, the wooden thorn remained in the body for at least seven or eight days." Gu Yanan used tweezers to hold the wooden thorns and show them to the farmer.

The farmer felt a little guilty, and as the owner of the farm, he personally examined the horse, but found that the horse's injury was in the jaw.

Xiao Chu: "Check out the wound, and then according to the symptoms, it is tetanus, just treat it according to tetanus, and the farmer doesn't have to worry about the disease being contagious, but the external environment of your farm needs to be rectified." ”

"The outside world? How to straighten it out? ”

Xiao Chu was stunned for a moment, thinking to himself, Clostridium tetani exists in the external environment, and the farmer cannot be allowed to disinfect the entire farm, if that happens, not only can Clostridium tetani not be eliminated, but also destroy the ecology.

Gu Yanan: "The personnel and livestock on the farm should avoid being punctured by things such as iron nails and wooden thorns, and those with these risk factors in the farm environment should be cleaned up in time, and there is one thing I hope the farmer will help, please help lead the way through the location of the Angel Animation Company's activities last weekend, and the disease control should sample the environment in which they once lived." ”

"Okay, no problem, they were mainly in the newly built field development training base on my farm, and there were several dormitories, one of them went to Biluo Cliff at night, and fell into a trap on the way, I asked the farm staff to show you the way."

Re-walking the road of Angel Animation Company's weekend team building, Gu Yanan and Xiao Chu collected enough external environmental samples.

When the specimen was sent back to the CDC laboratory, it was already noon, and the testing task was explained to Section Chief Li of the Laboratory Department.

Section Chief Li: "Isolate Clostridium tetani? This was rarely done before, but the principle of bacterial isolation is the same, it is no problem to do, and you will get the results in two days. But as for the sequencing and analysis of Clostridium tetani genes, these need to be done by you, Director Gu, because our laboratory department is too busy, and there is no additional funding. ”

"No problem, hand it to me after I get the strain, it just so happens that I recently want to do a batch of sequencing strains, and I did it together by the way."

After having lunch in the unit canteen at noon, Gu Yanan and Xiao Chu went to Yuntai District CDC to continue the on-site supervision of nucleic acid capacity building.

——

Two days later, the laboratory isolated Clostridium tetani strains from the environment outside Yunwu Farm and the body fluid samples of patients Li Ming and Li Xin.

Gu Yanan got the strain and carried out the next gene sequence analysis.

After sequencing and gene comparison, it was found that the newly isolated Clostridium tetani had no obvious variation in the pathogenic gene sequence.

Previous concerns about the mutation of Clostridium tetani and the possibility of human-to-human transmission can be ruled out.

Lianhai Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Emergency Office.

Gu Yanan took advantage of the free time when the on-site supervisor came back to write a summary report on the tetanus epidemic.

At the southern end of the Yuntai Mountains in Lianhai City, a new field development training base has been developed in Yunwu Farm.

More than 20 employees of Angel Animation Company went to Cloud Farm for team building on the weekend.

Employees Li Ming and Li Xin fell into a trap used to hunt and were stabbed by wooden thorns inside the trap.

After the team building, the two had tetanus symptoms one after another.

Yu Xiaorong, an employee of the company, saw Li Xin's tetanus symptoms and developed hysteria.

The horses in Cloud Farm were stabbed by iron nails and wooden thorns in the outside environment, and they also developed tetanus symptoms one after another.

After testing, tetanus toxin was found in Li Ming and Li Xin's bodies, and Clostridium tetani was isolated from the samples of the two people, and Clostridium tetani spores were found in the environment outside Cloud Farm.

Gene sequence analysis showed that the newly isolated Clostridium tetani had no obvious mutation in the pathogenic genes.

Patients Li Ming and Li Xin gradually recovered after treatment, and Yu Xiaorong was successfully discharged from the hospital after psychological intervention.

One of the horses that suffered tetanus at Cloud Farm died, while the other was cured.

The tetanus outbreak was brought under control through environmental clean-up, health promotion, and vaccination of high-risk groups in Cloud Farm.

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