A week before being admitted to the hospital, patient V.T.T, 54 years old in Hai Phong, had a fever and was diagnosed with dengue fever. After being cured, the patient still felt pain in his neck and shoulders, so his family took him to a private clinic and gave him an injection directly into his neck and shoulders.
One day after the injection, the patient had a fever again, accompanied by paralysis of both legs that gradually spread to both arms and loss of sensation in the entire area from the waist down. The patient was hospitalized with a diagnosis of infection - spondylitis.
Immediately afterwards, the patient was transferred to the Emergency Department, Central Hospital for Tropical Diseases in a conscious state but completely paralyzed from the neck down; both arms could only move 1/5, both legs were completely paralyzed, lost sensation from the waist down, and began to show signs of respiratory muscle paralysis, requiring mechanical ventilation and maintenance of vasopressors.
Doctor Pham Thanh Bang, Emergency Department, Central Hospital for Tropical Diseases said: The patient was diagnosed with septicemia - cervical myelitis with staphylococcus monitoring, was ordered an MRI scan to detect images of diffuse spinal cord damage, spinal cord edema causing loss of motor and sensory function, consistent with clinical presentation, no image of cervical spinal abscess, so a multidisciplinary consultation was performed with indications for spinal decompression and antibiotic treatment.
After treatment, the patient's infection was stable but quadriplegia improved slowly. This is a rare case of myelitis caused by gram-positive bacilli, especially staphylococci.
Staphylococcus mostly invades through intravenous injection, bacteria directly invade causing diffuse osteomyelitis (does not cause meningitis) causing the entire bone marrow to lose function with clinical manifestations of paralysis.
