A swimmer off the outer banks of North Carolina had to be airlifted to a hospital after the seventh shark attack in the last three weeks.
Hyde County spokesman Sarah Johnson said the victim is a man in his late-50s who suffered wounds to his rib cage, lower leg, hip and both hands.
Witnesses say the man was directly in front of a lifeguard stand when a 6 to 7-foot grey shark attacked him around noon Wednesday. Johnson said the victim was conscious and stable before being flown to the hospital.
The National Park Service said the attack happened in waist deep water about 25 feet from the shore.
The shark attack today is not the only unusual incident on an East Coast beach.
New Jersey officials reported that the deadly Portuguese Man O’ War have washed up on state beaches. The organism, which can grow to be a foot long with tentacles that can reach 165 feet, causes severe pain to humans and if it reaches the lymph nodes can cause shock, interference with heart and lung functions, and death.
A European Union funded project is seeking to find new antibiotics using previously unknown bacteria from the ocean floor.
The project has ships in the Lyngen Fjord of northern Norway collecting soil and animals from the bottom of the Arctic Ocean hoping to find new bacteria that could be used for a new generation of antibiotics.
“If no one finds new antibiotics for common infections, what will happen is we will go back to the pre-antibiotic age in which a simple cut could turn into an infection that becomes deadly,” Marcel Jaspars told CNN.
Major drug manufacturers are not creating new antibiotics despite the rise of anti-biotic resistant bacteria because of the prohibitive costs for bringing a new drug to the marketplace. Jaspars says that while bacteria have developed resistance to the antibiotics of the last 30 years, they can’t defend against something they’ve never seen.
“In the past, bacteria and fungi have been the main sources for new antibiotics,” Jaspars explained. “In fact, about 70% of our antibiotics still come from nature, normally from sediment samples and soil samples from land. But now, by looking at the ocean, we hope to find new life forms which give us new chemistry that might be able to treat bacterial infections.”
Researchers say that several of the new bacteria discovered on the ocean floor have shown promise for creating new antibiotics.