It took nearly two years for doctors to figure out the cause of his chest pain. //

The doctors were concerned enough that they decided it was time to take the implant out. After removing it, they sent the device and samples to the Florida health department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which did clinical and genetic testing. They all turned up Brucella suis.

B. suis is an extremely infectious bacteria that's usually found in pigs. The most common symptom in pigs is reproductive losses, such as stillbirths, though they can also develop other symptoms, such as abscesses and arthritis. In humans, it causes an insidious, hard to detect infection called brucellosis, which is used to describe an infection from any Brucella species: B. suis, B. melitensis, B. abortus, and B. canis.

In the US, there are only about 80 to 140 brucellosis cases reported each year, and they're mostly caused by B. melitensis and B. abortus. People tend to get infected by eating raw (unpasteurized) milk and cheeses. B. suis, however, is generally linked to hunting and butchering feral pigs and hogs.

Until recently, the Brucella species were designated as select agents by the US government, a classification to flag pathogens and toxins that have the potential to be a severe threat to public health, such as if they're used in a bioterror attack. The current list includes things like anthrax and Ebola virus. Brucella species were originally listed because they can be easily aerosolized, and only a small number of the bacterial cells are needed to spark an infection. In humans, infections can be both localized and systemic and have a broad range of clinical manifestations. Those include brain infections, neurological conditions, arthritis, anemia, respiratory involvement, pancreatitis, cardiovascular complications, like aneurysms, and inflammation of the spinal cord, among many other things.

In January, federal officials removed Brucella species from the select agents list—a designation that limits the types and amount of research that can be done on a pathogen. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the reason for the removal was to ease those limits, thereby making it easier for researchers to conduct veterinary studies and develop vaccines for animals. //

The man said he wasn't a hunter, but recalled receiving a gift of feral swine meat on several occasions in 2017 from a local hunter. Though he couldn’t recall the specific hunter who gave him the biohazardous bounty, he did remember handling the raw meat and blood with his bare hands—a clear transmission risk—before cooking and eating it. //

The man, meanwhile, finally received the proper course of antibiotics recommended by the CDC for brucellosis treatment, which was a combination of oral doxycycline and rifampin for six weeks. At the end of the course, his blood cultures were negative. A few months later, he had a new AICD placed. A year after the ordeal, lingering signs of the infection had faded. At a routine check-up after more than 3 years, he appeared to remain free of brucellosis.