Doctors are sounding the alarm over a drug-resistant superbug that is spreading across the US.
Shigellosis is transmitted easily via contact with feces and triggers explosive, bloody diarrhea and severe stomach pain.
While many patients recover in a week with just bed rest, in severe cases patients can suffer from intense and prolonged diarrhea that causes dehydration, which can be life threatening.
Normally, for these patients, their infection is quickly treated with antibiotics.
In a growing number of cases, however, the CDC warns that the drugs doctors typically turn to no longer work because of the spread of a new drug-resistant strain of the virus, called XDR.
In a new report out last week, the agency warned that while the drug-resistant strain of shigellosis caused no infections nationwide in 2011, by 2023, it was behind 8.5 percent of cases -- and this number is rising.
About a third of patients infected with the drug-resistant strain were hospitalized, well-above the typical hospitalization rate of one percent.
No deaths from the drug-resistant strain have been reported in the US.
Health officials are warning about exposure to the pathogen that causes explosive, bloody diarrhea.
Health officials warned that the drug-resistant strain was a 'public health threat' and called for 'strengthened surveillance' to help limit its spread.
About 450,000 Americans are infected with shigella bacteria -- which causes shigellosis -- every year, while about 6,000 are hospitalized and 40 die from the disease.
Symptoms last for about a week and are more severe than the diarrhea caused by norovirus, which infects about 19 million Americans every year but causes symptoms that last for just one to two days. Children under five years old are most at risk of the infection.
Historically, shigellosis has been most commonly recorded in children, and outbreaks have been linked to child care centers and schools.
Latest data for the drug-resistant strain, however, shows that it is most likely to be detected among middle-aged men.
In the report, health officials analyzed data from Pulsenet, the CDC's surveillance network for nationally notifiable diseases such as shigellosis.
From January 2011 to October 2023, the team found 16,788 shigellosis infections, of which 505 cases were caused by the drug-resistant strain.
Only a handful of cases were recorded in the US until 2020, when infections started to surge. By 2023, the latest year available, it was behind 280 of the 3,500 infections recorded -- or eight percent.
Overall, the Western US had the most infections, recording 54 percent of total drug-resistant infections in 2023, followed by the Northeast, which registered 38 percent.
The South and Midwest both recorded about 10 percent each of drug-resistant infections in the latest year.
For the strain, about 66 percent of patients were infected with a type called shigella sonnei -- resistant to at least three antibiotics -- and 172 were shigella flexneri -- resistant to at least four antibiotics.
For the patients, 86.2 percent were male, and they were 41 years old on average.
Seventy-six percent reported no recent travel, while 82 percent reported no recent international travel.
Travel is typically a major risk factor for shigella because people may be exposed to food, water or sanitation that may be unsafe or improperly treated.
Shigellosis is highly transmissible, and an infection can often be triggered if someone is exposed to just 10 shigella bacteria, which release toxins that cause the disease.
The new strain of shigella is just the latest drug-resistant bug to emerge in the US.
About 236 million antibiotic prescriptions for people are written in the US annually, the CDC estimates, while millions more doses are given to animals every year to slash the risk of infection and boost meat yields.
This huge use of the drugs raises the risk of new and resistant bacteria strains emerging and spreading rapidly, threatening to turn once easily-treated diseases into death sentences.
Today, more than 2.8 million drug-resistant bacterial infections are diagnosed in the US every year. Overall, about 35,000 people die from these infections every year, equivalent to about one death every 15 minutes.
Experts warn that, without action, drug-resistant infections are only likely to become more common.