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StaphAseptic™ News
Backing away from the MRSA crisis
April 12, 2010
Los Angeles Times
By Maryn McKenna
Last month, public health researchers reported that six Canadians -- one in Ontario, five in Saskatchewan -- were infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, drug-resistant staph. That may not sound unusual, but there was something odd about their illnesses: They were caused by a strain that during the last few years has spread through livestock and farm workers in Europe and North America. But the Canadians made sick by the bacterium had no contact with animals or farming; one of them, an elderly woman, had been housebound for several years.
Last week, epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Hospital revealed that 61% of the children in their pediatric intensive care unit -- kids enduring advanced cancers, organ transplants and tricky infusions of stem cells -- were carrying MRSA, but not the usual hospital strains. Instead, the kids had a strain that predominates outside healthcare and is more transmissible, more virulent and harder to detect than the hospital variety. While they were counting the cases, one child developed a serious bloodstream infection from the community bug, something that would never have happened just a few years ago.
Reports like these are warning bells, and there have been many of them ringing, mostly unheard, for a decade now. Collectively they signal that drug-resistant staph has changed in startling and threatening ways, and that our control efforts, and even our ability to detect it, have not kept up.
Most people think of MRSA as a healthcare infection, and it is: It is a risk for patients who are elderly or immune-compromised, and for those who are taking many antibiotics or are pierced by lines and catheters that breach the immune protection of their skin. We hear of it less frequently outside the walls of hospitals, and then primarily as an irritant that shades occasionally into illness, as when skin infections bedeviled the USC Trojans and the Cleveland Browns.
But MRSA is not just an irritant, and it is far from occasional. It is a consistent global epidemic, stretching over more than 50 years. And though it began in hospitals, it has now moved into the everyday world, where it has found a niche in industrial-scale farming, in the close quarters of gyms and prisons and in professional and school sports. It is an everyday complaint in emergency rooms nationwide, and it is the spark for infections that can destroy a child's lungs before an ambulance can get to his door.
Its comprehensive assault has gone largely unnoticed, because some of MRSA's victims are patients in nursing homes, some are kids seen in pediatric offices, and some are pets or livestock animals that are cared for by veterinarians -- and none of those sectors of medicine and public health routinely talk to each other.
This is a portion of the original article. To keep reading, visit LATimes.com
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