A discovery last year that northern fur seals on St. Paul Island were carrying Coxiella burnetti, a bacteria that can cause illness, has motivated scientists to do more sleuthing. Can the bacteria cause seals and other marine mammals to get sick? Were villagers ever exposed to it and if so, did they become ill?

The infection, known as Q Fever, can cause a varying mix of flu-like symptoms, including a high fever, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Alaska has documented only one case of the bacteria making an Alaskan sick, and that person picked it up overseas, according a bulletin issued Sept. 7 by the Alaska Department of Epidemiology in response to findings by Colorado State University researchers. But that doesn't mean there haven't been other cases, since Alaska didn't begin to collect data on human Coxiella infections until 2007.

Coxiella burnetti is more generally known to occur in land animals and birds. In Alaska, caribou, muskoxen, mountain goats, Dall sheep, wolves, and grizzly bears have been tested for the bacteria, with caribou discovered as the largest carrier. Although the bacteria is present among this wildlife, there's no evidence the bacteria has made any of the wildlife sick, according to the bulletin. The CSU study, combined with recent occurrences of human illness in places like the state of Washington, Greenland and the Netherlands has the science community taking a new look at the disease.

There is a long list of known facts about Q Fever. It's been around a long time. It's found just about everywhere, including places you might expect, like near animals, and those that might surprise you, like schools, retail stores and banks. It's hard to kill. It travels easily on dust particles and is found in animal placentas, milk and feces; and because it could feasibly be used in an aerosol to spray over a wide area, it's considered a potential bioterrorism agent, one that won't kill people but which could debilitate large numbers of them by making them sick.

Louis Castrodale, an epidemiologist with the state of Alaska who helped author the Q Fever bulletin, describes the bacteria as a "ubiquitous organism" that's found not just in animals, but also in oceans, sediment and other places in the environment. One of the interesting things about that is while it is present in a wide variety of places, the numbers of people who get sick from it aren't huge, she said.

Data from the CDC illustrates how unusual the illness is in people in the United States. The CDC has never received more than 200 reports of it in a given year. Yet common flu can strike between 5 to 20 percent of the U.S. population each year, anywhere from 15 to 62 million people.

Historically, people have not routinely looked for Coxiella burnetti in marine mammals, which makes the current findings difficult to place into context. Has the bacteria always been around in marine mammal populations, but just hasn't been noticed? Or, is it just starting to affect species that had previously been unexposed or unaffected? And, does it have the potential to make sea life or the humans that come into contact with it sick? The answers aren't known.

To learn more, CSU has returned to the Pribilof Islands to study the bacteria's effect on fur seals more in-depth. Scientists also want to find out if Coxiella is present in Stellar sea lions, ice seals, walrus and other animals and birds from the area.

Previous blood samples collected from villagers of St. Paul and St. George Islands in the 1980s and 1990s will also be tested for Coxiella burnetti antibodies.

Ultimately, scientists want to know how widespread Coxiella is among Alaska's marine life, how long it's been around, whether it's made people sick in the past and how to prevent it in the future.

Contact Jill Burke at jill(at)alaskadispatch.com