Madonna gave her fans the scare of her life last weekend when she had to be rushed to hospital after being found unconscious by her team. After being diagnosed with a “bacterial infection”, the 64-year-old singer was forced to remain in the intensive care unit, as her representative Guy Oseary reported on Wednesday.
“His health is improving, but he is still under medical care. He is expected to make a full recovery,” Oseary explained in a statement posted on his Instagram account. An unexpected setback that obviously forced the cancellation of the singer’s tour, currently with several concerts planned, including two concerts in Barcelona next November.
Many might think that an infection shouldn’t require so much care and that a simple course of antibiotics should suffice, but perhaps they should know that common bacterial infections are the second leading cause of death worldwide. Just to give an example, the pathogen staphylococcus aureus is capable of causing food poisoning that can be fatal to hundreds of thousands of people.
The worst thing is that this type of pathogenic bacteria is everywhere: the air, the food, the surfaces where we rest, the animals, the water… Some are known (such as Escherichia Coli (E. Coli), Pseudomonas aeruginosas , and Streptococcus
pneumoniae) and that cause diseases such as bacterial meningitis, salmonella, tuberculosis, urinary tract infections or strep throat.
Many of these pathogenic bacteria are also especially dangerous (only these five are responsible for the majority of deaths from bacterial infections) as they are resistant to antibiotic treatments -listed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Bacterial infections can affect various parts of the body, including the throat, lungs, skin, or intestines. It is unknown what type of infection the singer could have contracted, but her admission and stay in the ICU could indicate that she could have contracted a respiratory infection (pneumonia), the most common that usually requires admission to intensive care units along with the meningitis, encephalitis and urinary tract infections.
Luckily, as confirmed by his representative, the diagnosis was early, so his treatment was applied soon and would be proving effective, leading to his gradual recovery.
Once recovered, the singer is confident that she can resume her tour plans, which were to begin with a concert in Vancouver B.C. (Canada), on July 15. After this first stop, the tour had to visit several cities in North America to land in Europe in October, with Barcelona as the only Spanish city that was going to receive the Celebration Tour, with two concerts at the Palau Sant Jordi on November 1 and 2.
