Some Handy Information About MRSA and Antibiotic Resistance

Not sure what MRSA or antibiotic resistance are? Want to know more, and what you can do about them? The Massachusetts Department of Public Health just unveiled a new website about MRSA and antibiotic resistance.  And these explanations work outside of Massachusetts too...

(crossposted at Mike the Mad Biologist)

Comments

[Aaron]

Coincidentally I was given MRSA in the hospital after suffering a severe trauma. It turned a bad situation into a permanently life altering one from a number of aspects.

An extremely healthy adult male weightlifter who had a resting pulse rate in the high 50s, I was in the best shape of my life when this accident occurred, and it took me four months of extremely expensive ($46,000) intravenous antibiotic therapy to overcome this resistant staph infection.

I went in the hospital weighing 214 lbs. at 9% body fat, at the worst I was down into the high 130s. If I hadn't been in excellent condition I surely would not have survived.

Some of these strains are so virulent that if you don't catch them in the first 72 hours, even a healthy person's chance of survival drops into the single-digit percentile range.

Frightening to think that these bacterial strains are now out in the environment, virtually everywhere. Our own little biological war going on right underneath our feet.

[Mike the Mad Biologist]

Aaron,

if there's any 'good' news about MRSA, it's that the community-acquired MRSA (CA-MRSA) are sensitive to more antibiotics than the hospital-acquired MRSA. I'm not sure if the CA-MRSA are more or less dangerous than the hospital strains. In the past HA-MRSA was more dangerous, but that was primarily due to a couple of dangerous strains acquiring methicillin resistance. Now that methicillin resistance is so widespread and the hospital strains have 'leaked out' into the non-hospital environment, some MRSA isn't so dangerous anymore (although any staph bacterium in a normal sterile site can be quite serious).

[epistemology]

Being lectured about antibiotic resistance by government employees on a government web site is a little like being lectured by George W. Bush on oil addiction.

Of course it is worse than useless to take an antibiotic for viral illnesses. But millions spent to educate the public on this is a waste when US agriculture uses almost half of all antibiotics in America for profit, not disease; virtually all antibiotic resistance in America develops in hospital settings; and virtually all antibiotic resistance (like GC to penicillin) begins in less developed parts of the world.