Friday, July 13, 2007
Understanding MRSA – Part I:
By Phillip T. Alden
San Mateo Daily Journal
For publication – July 17, 2007
MRSA is an acronym for a highly infectious bacteria, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as Staph. This form is resistant to the first line antibiotic used to combat the illness in humans, but MRSA is often resistant to most of the drugs used to treat it, not just the Methicillin for which it's named. People infected with MRSA are highly contagious and potentially dangerous to interact with on an intimate basis.
And MRSA can happen to anyone hospitalized under certain conditions, the most dangerous being invasive surgery. But close contact with an MRSA patient can also spread the disease and there are people in the population who are infectious. Sadly, some of them live in near-homelessness or live on the street. I'm not suggesting that we get hysterical around the homeless as most are not carrying any infectious illnesses. People from all walks of life and all income levels are infected with MRSA.
Most MRSA patients are told how contagious they are and at what periods, (when they have a certain number of active symptoms,) and told how they must limit their contact with others. Most MRSA patients simply take themselves out of circulation for the most part. But the world is not all that cut-and-dried, where we all have someone to shop for us and do all those other things necessary for living. When MRSA hits a person living paycheck-to-paycheck it can be devastating. They are too sick to work, and the $900 a month the federal government gives to a wage slave who becomes disabled is hardly enough to live on under the best of conditions. Imagine trying to live in San Mateo County or San Francisco on $900 a month, then add the isolation, and you have an impossible situation.
For a long time MRSA was a "dirty little secret" in the medical community because the bacteria can become endemic in a clinical setting, and nearly impossible to remove. Stanford University Medical Center is infected with MRSA, (among other infectious organisms,) but there are few better places in this country, (if not the world,) to have specialized surgery. Most medical facilities have this problem, the older the facility, the more likely it's infected with MRSA. All hospitals and large health care facilities where invasive procedures are performed have an Infection Control Team, usually headed by a doctor with special training in infectious diseases. The only way to remove the MRSA is to build a new facility and tear the old one down, destroying a lot of very expensive medical equipment in the process.
So we see already that MRSA is a complicated problem, and one that we should all understand fully. Once a patient has MRSA there is very little chance of clearing it from the body and it is considered a factor in mortality, (death.) Both CA-MRSA (community-associated MRSA) and HA-MRSA (hospital-associated MRSA) are on the rise. And MRSA keeps becoming resistant to the arsenal of drugs used to treat it. So both the problem and the disease itself are getting worse.
One obvious aspect to successfully combating this disease is better health care for everyone, and a stronger and more robust public health system run by doctors and not politicians. A CDC whose scientists and physicians are strongly supported by the public is a good start. A hard look at the abysmal treatment disabled Americans get is another.
(Part II will cover the personal experience of two MRSA patients and the people who love them.)
By Phillip T. Alden
San Mateo Daily Journal
For publication – July 17, 2007
MRSA is an acronym for a highly infectious bacteria, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as Staph. This form is resistant to the first line antibiotic used to combat the illness in humans, but MRSA is often resistant to most of the drugs used to treat it, not just the Methicillin for which it's named. People infected with MRSA are highly contagious and potentially dangerous to interact with on an intimate basis.
And MRSA can happen to anyone hospitalized under certain conditions, the most dangerous being invasive surgery. But close contact with an MRSA patient can also spread the disease and there are people in the population who are infectious. Sadly, some of them live in near-homelessness or live on the street. I'm not suggesting that we get hysterical around the homeless as most are not carrying any infectious illnesses. People from all walks of life and all income levels are infected with MRSA.
Most MRSA patients are told how contagious they are and at what periods, (when they have a certain number of active symptoms,) and told how they must limit their contact with others. Most MRSA patients simply take themselves out of circulation for the most part. But the world is not all that cut-and-dried, where we all have someone to shop for us and do all those other things necessary for living. When MRSA hits a person living paycheck-to-paycheck it can be devastating. They are too sick to work, and the $900 a month the federal government gives to a wage slave who becomes disabled is hardly enough to live on under the best of conditions. Imagine trying to live in San Mateo County or San Francisco on $900 a month, then add the isolation, and you have an impossible situation.
For a long time MRSA was a "dirty little secret" in the medical community because the bacteria can become endemic in a clinical setting, and nearly impossible to remove. Stanford University Medical Center is infected with MRSA, (among other infectious organisms,) but there are few better places in this country, (if not the world,) to have specialized surgery. Most medical facilities have this problem, the older the facility, the more likely it's infected with MRSA. All hospitals and large health care facilities where invasive procedures are performed have an Infection Control Team, usually headed by a doctor with special training in infectious diseases. The only way to remove the MRSA is to build a new facility and tear the old one down, destroying a lot of very expensive medical equipment in the process.
So we see already that MRSA is a complicated problem, and one that we should all understand fully. Once a patient has MRSA there is very little chance of clearing it from the body and it is considered a factor in mortality, (death.) Both CA-MRSA (community-associated MRSA) and HA-MRSA (hospital-associated MRSA) are on the rise. And MRSA keeps becoming resistant to the arsenal of drugs used to treat it. So both the problem and the disease itself are getting worse.
One obvious aspect to successfully combating this disease is better health care for everyone, and a stronger and more robust public health system run by doctors and not politicians. A CDC whose scientists and physicians are strongly supported by the public is a good start. A hard look at the abysmal treatment disabled Americans get is another.
(Part II will cover the personal experience of two MRSA patients and the people who love them.)
# posted by Phillip T. Alden @ 9:29 AM 
