A Connecticut man died on Monday, five years after being infected with a rare fatal disease contracted from a mosquito bite in his own backyard, with health officials noting a concerning rise in cases.
Richard Pawulski, a 49-year-old husband and father, fell ill in August 2019 after doing some yard work at his Colchester home, the New York Post reported
Just one day after noticing a mosquito bite, the Poland-born man began experiencing headaches and vomited bile.
He was rushed to the emergency room and underwent surgery to relieve swelling in his brain, but complications with the procedure resulted in him winding up in a coma.
“It wasn’t until other cases of Eastern equine encephalitis (EEE) started cropping up in the state that doctors realized Richard could also be a victim of the virus,” the outlet reported, noting that Pawulski was the only survivor out of Connecticut’s four total EEE cases that year.
After doctors told his wife, Malgorzata, and daughter, Amellia, that he would be brain damaged if he ever woke up, the family decided that he would have wanted them to pull the plug.
That is when Pawulski suddenly woke up, the Post reported.
Despite the miracle, his struggles did not end there. For years, the dad suffered from his traumatic brain injury, liver and kidney issues, seizures, pneumonia, and other complications.
Due to his brain damage, he often experienced memory loss and did not know where or when he was.
“Fortunately, he was lucid enough in the days before his death to tell his wife and daughter that he loved them,” the outlet noted.
“I’m not joking when I say your life can change in the blink of an eye, because that was what happened to us,” Amellia told the publication after her father’s death.
“He always tried to look at on the positive,” the 18-year-old said. “I remember people being like, ‘Oh, how’s your day?’ And he was like, ‘My day is great. I woke up. I can breathe on my own. I can talk on my own. I can go to the bathroom on my own. I have no reason to be upset.’”
Pawulski died shortly after doctors said “there wasn’t much else” they could do for him after he contracted a staph infection, Amellia said.
“None of this stuff would have come up if he didn’t get it,” she added, referring to the several ailments her father suffered over the years after getting bit.
Approximately 30 percent of people who develop severe EEE will die, and many survivors have ongoing neurologic problems, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Symptoms listed by the health agency include fever, headache, vomiting, diarrhea, seizures, behavioral changes, and drowsiness.
There are no vaccines or medicines to prevent or treat the terrifying disease.
Data collected by the CDC shows that there have been 16 known cases in the U.S. in 2024, with the majority located in New England.
Pawulski’s case “is thought to be the most severe of them all,” Dr. Roy Gulick, chief of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, told the Post.
He remarked on a mysterious rise of infected mosquitoes, especially in New York, with state officials finding the dangerous insects across at least 15 counties compared to the usual two or three.
“It’s usually sporadic and it’s not clear why. One year we see more than another,” Gulick said.
“This year there have been both mosquito pools testing positive and horses testing positive as well, so the presence of this virus is more so than we’ve seen in previous years. Cases are kind of scattered throughout New York — people really need to pay attention to this and do everything they can to avoid mosquito bites.”
The CDC recommends that people take precautions to prevent mosquito bites.
