beware the cockroach

photo via Shanghai China Snippets

Good hygiene can stop staph infections
Lauran Neegaard, AP, 11/7/07

WASHINGTON - Drug-resistant staph infections that have made headlines in recent weeks come from what the nation's top doctor calls "the cockroach of bacteria" — a bad germ that can lurk in lots of places, but not one that should trigger panic.

It takes close contact — things like sharing towels and razors, or rolling on the wrestling mat or football field with open scrapes, or not bandaging cuts — to become infected with the staph germ called MRSA outside of a hospital, she said. But MRSA is preventable largely by common-sense hygiene, Gerberding stressed.

"Soap and water is the cheapest intervention we have, and it's one of the most effective," she told a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Over time, germs evolve to withstand treatment. Most staph is no longer treatable by the granddaddy of antibiotics, penicillin. By the 1960s, staph also began developing resistance to a second antibiotic, methicillin.

MRSA mostly causes skin infections, such as boils and abscesses. But it can sometimes spread to cause life-threatening blood infections. Last month, the CDC reported the first national estimate of serious MRSA infections — 94,000 a year. It's not clear how many people die, but one estimate put the MRSA death toll at more than 18,000, slightly higher than U.S. deaths from AIDS.

Should every patient entering a hospital be tested for MRSA, and isolated if they harbor it? Some hospitals have begun that, but current guidelines call for that step only if hospitals fail to reduce MRSA infections by less drastic means, Gerberding said.

*note: The leg was put in isolation for a month with MRSA. It was nice to have a private room in a county facility but the cockroach delayed my recovery and forced the doctors to revise the blueprints for operation rebuild.

Her concern: "Patients in isolation get less care." Doctors and nurses check on them less. They get more bed sores, opening the body to other life-threatening germs.

It seems like common sense but PLEASE, PLEASE wash your hands regularly or carry hand sanitizer and bandage your cuts and scrapes.