ANCHORAGE, Alaska (ALASKA BEACON) – When a 29-year-old Anchorage man returned from a bear hunt on the Alaska Peninsula in September of 2024, he had a persistent and painful finger infection that defied easy diagnosis.
His swollen and aching finger wound up making medical history, reports Yereth Rosen with the Alaska Beacon.
The infection was a case of what is commonly known as “seal finger,” an infection caused by the bacteria Mycoplasma phocimorsus, a name that incorporates a compound Latin term for “seal bite.”
But instead of getting it from a seal, the patient had contracted it from a brown bear that he had hunted and skinned.
“This patient hadn’t had anything to do with seals,” said Dr. Benjamin Westley, the Anchorage-based infectious disease specialist who treated the hunter and ultimately determined the cause of the infection.
The case, detailed in a recent bulletin issued by the epidemiology section of the Alaska Division of Public Health and in an earlier U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report, was only the second known case of a person contracting seal finger from an animal other than a seal and the first implicating a bear, Westley said.
The other non-seal case, reported in 2013, was from a cat that had scratched a 54-year-old woman in Denmark. As with the bear hunter, the Denmark case sparked a detailed medical investigation and questions about new pathways for transmission of diseases from animals to people.
It took a lot of work to identify the bear hunter’s infection as a case of seal finger. The diagnosis came in November of 2024, after weeks of treatment that included antibiotics, exploratory surgery, DNA analysis and a hospital stay. The patient, who had suffered through fever and other problems, eventually recovered the following January, Westley said.
Successful treatment required extended use of doxycycline, a specific type of antibiotic, he said.
Seal finger is not new. It was originally identified in 1907 in Norway. There are occasional cases in Alaska, where traditional Indigenous seal hunting is legal. But because it is not a reportable disease, exact case numbers in the state are unknown, Westley said.
There are also occasional cases among people working with seals in aquariums or veterinary labs, or among scientists doing field research, Westley said.
For now, there is no ready explanation of how this brown bear acquired the infection, but there are several ways it could have happened, he said.
“Brown bears on the Alaska Peninsula are on the beach constantly, and they’ll eat anything,” he said. The hunter did not describe seeing any seals at the time, but the bear could have preyed on a seal, scavenged a dead seal or even eaten some kind of marine organism that had some contact with an infected seal, he said.
With so few non-seal-related cases reported, it remains unclear how the infection may be spreading among animal species.
There is also no link between human seal finger cases and climate change, other than a theory about possible increased interaction between people and Arctic animals as ship travel and other activity increases in the far north, Westley said.
“People are in more contact with animals that they hadn’t been previously, probably in higher numbers, so there may be some of that kind of thing,” he said.
The epidemiology bulletin includes some recommendations for both medical providers and hunters for treatment or prevention of future cases. Among them is a recommendation that hunters harvesting seals or animals known to prey on seals wear heavy gloves and wash their hands thoroughly after handling the animals.
This story has been republished with permission from the Alaska Beacon.
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