Lepto deals staggering blow
People need to keep an eye out for leptospirosis as cases are rising.
Southland dry stock farmer Grant Catto knew when he saw a flock of sheep running through his bedroom that he had something far worse than simply a case of the flu.
That was back in 2016. Seven years on, he is still recovering from what was diagnosed as le p to spiros is, and he has some sharp insights for farmers everywhere on just how severe the disease can be.
Catto had helped a heifer calve in a stubble paddock, and then over the weekend he started feeling like he was getting a dose of spring flu. After getting worse over those days, his wife Katie took him to the local doctor, where blood tests came up negative.
“But I really knew things were getting worse by the Tuesday.
“I had a lie-down after lunch, and half an hour later I was hallucinating that there were sheep running through our room. Katie called an ambulance, and it was off to Invercargill Hospital.”
For Katie, the decline she witnessed in her husband was breathtakingly rapid. “He went from feeling like he had the flu, but with sore knees and brown urine, to very nearly dying, all within only a few hours.”
After being admitted to hospital, Catto recalls he became a bedridden bystander to desperate efforts to keep his vital organs functioning. After tests and scans, he was flown by helicopter to Dunedin Hospital’s ICU.
“Between those tests from the doctor on the Monday and the Tuesday, my kidneys stopped working, my liver was shutting down, fluid was filling my lungs, and I was going into septic shock.
For the first couple of days, doctors scrambled to come up with a diagnosis. He recalls little of that time, which largely passed as a blur.
Then followed five weeks of recovery in Dunedin Hospital, including two weeks of dialysis as his kidneys recovered from what had been determined as the Ballum strain of leptospirosis, one of the most commonly identified with the disease in humans and accounting for a third of all cases diagnosed in New Zealand.
Catto acknowledges that lepto is not an easy disease to walk away from, and seven years on he still feels the after-effects of it.
“For the first six to seven months it was like having a constant hangover 24/7. I also had sensitivity to light, noise and crowds, and an almost constant sense of fatigue.”
You go back to zero and you have to start again on a lot of things, you improve, and then you plateau.
For a fit, hardworking Southland farmer, lepto was a staggering blow that had an impact on how the family farm was run, with Katie fortunately capable of picking up the reins for an extended time as he recovered.
He says there was also a lingering mental effect where the disease slowed his thinking processes.
“You would only be capable of thinking one step at a time. It has got better but I would find even relatively simple calculations could prove difficult early on.
“Today I don’t have headaches so often, but I do still experience the fatigue.”
He likens the recovery experience to reverse ageing, gradually reacquainting himself with abilities that had slipped away almost unnoticed, until he got them back.
“As a doctor said to me, you go back to zero and you have to start again on a lot of things, you improve, and then you plateau. There are things that you may not get back.”
His experience is supported by Massey University research on 94 patients who contracted the disease between 2019 and 2021.
It found two-thirds ended up in hospital for an average of four nights and more than half still had issues with fatigue eight months after contracting the disease.
Since the infection, Catto has been keen to let more farmers know the risks behind lepto, and how best to avoid it.
The strain he was exposed to is not covered by a vaccine, being carried by rodents which he suspects had been in the stubble paddock.
But for farmers where the risk of livestock-borne lepto is particularly high, he maintains that livestock vaccination is a vital health and safety move to preserve your own health and that of your family and staff on the farm.
“You just have to ask. If it can be avoided, would you want this to happen to anyone on your farm? It puts pressure not just on whoever gets it, but their family and business too.”