Walmart is recalling nearly 4,000 bottles from a line of aromatherapy spray products linked with a bacterial disease outbreak. A bottle of “Better Homes & Gardens Lavender & Chamomile Essential Oil Infused Aromatherapy Room Spray with Gemstones” tested positive for B. pseudomallei, a rare and sometimes deadly bacteria that causes melioidosis.
When I saw the headline I thought it would be something like Staph, not fucking Burkholderia pseudomallei. B. pseudomallei is put on the “tier 1 select agent” list because it has strong potential as a bioterror weapon. Also on that list are Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) and Yersinia pestis (black plague).
Hey so we are like totally sorry you were exposed to a highly deadly bacteria that’s on par with anthrax and the black plague so we’ll make it up to you: how’s 20 bucks sound?
I thought the gift card was bad enough but the CDC disposal guidelines say:
“Double bag the bottle in clean, clear zip-top bags and place in a small cardboard box. Return the bagged and boxed product to a Walmart store.”
I don’t know how many bottles are actually thought to be contaminated but handing off waste potentially containing a select agent to a minimum wage retail employee who probably doesn’t even know what the recall was for… is really something. It really should be given to the local health department to be autoclaved as medical waste.
Part of the reason B. pseudomallei is on the select agent list, other than high morbidity/mortality rate is its really low infectious dose. You can potentially get infected from only 10 live bacterial cells. For comparison, you need to ingest about 1,000,000 Salmonella bacteria to get food poisoning. Point being, it wouldn’t take much mishandling to potentially kill somebody.
