Links
Backing away from the MRSA crisis
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.