Last year I had what looked like a spider bite on my knuckle. I didn’t think anything of it for a few days, but then I woke up to find my entire hand swollen and very painful. I went to my Dr and she diagnosed it as a MRSA staph infection. She gave me some antibiotics and said if it got any worse within the next few days to come back and she may have to send me to a hand surgeon. Well the next day the swelling was half way up my forearm! This being a sunday, I had to go to the ER. They gave me IV antibiotics that showed remarkable improvement in 24 hours.
My question is, how would this have played out if left completely untreated. Certain death? My body would eventually win a prolonged battle? And also, how far back in history would I have to go for me to have been beyond the help of medicine?
Which antibiotic was administered? If it’s vancomycin or a similar Drug Of Last Resort, fifty years ago you would have been a dead duck.
However, you must consider that MRSA did not exist before the penicillin era, it has evolved as a result of 20th century medicine. Sure, there’s a chance you could have caught an ultra-resilient strain back in the 1930’s, but even back then, your immune system would have been much more robust than it is today, thanks to surviving childhood diseases (diphtheria, german measles, etc.) which are practically non-existent today.
Pretty inevitable. MRSA is a pretty vicious bacteria, they are already finding variants that are resistant to the most widely accepted antibiotic out there which is vancomycin.
eta:buddha_david makes a good point, MRSA would not have existed too long ago and indeed has evolved as a result of exposure to methicillin antibiotics.
I am a doc who treats LOTS of MRSA. And who has presented formal lectures on how to treat it at medical conferences.
Over 95% of the uncomplicated MRSA skin or soft tissue infections will, if left alone, eventually be overcome by the body’s immune system and the person will recover. Generally the body will wall off the infection into an abscess cavity, which will eventually reach the skin surface and drain spontaneously.
The rest will get systemic infections and die, despite the immune system’s best efforts (or in some cases, because of its best efforts, but that’s another thread.)
It sounds like you were tipping towards just such a fatal infection.
Not far back at all–antibiotics only go back to WWII or so.
And thanks to people who take antibiotics inappropriately (i.e. for non-bacterial infections) or incorrectly (i.e. not finishing a full course of antibiotics), as well as the use of low-dose antibiotics in animal feedlots, and combined with the dearth of new antibiotics now being developed, it is quite likely the future will be the same. People will again die from “simple infections” because no antibiotic in our medicinal arsenal will have any effect on the multiple drug-resistant bacteria that are becoming more and more common.
There are plants with antimicrobial* properties that a healer would have used. Goldenseal is one of the big guns. St. John’s Wort, Garlic, Rosemary and Sage are all good for Staph, specifically**. In Egypt and the Middle East, they would probably use resins or essential oils, rather than raw plants. I don’t know the plants in that area well enough to tell you which ones, though.
We’d have made a poultice by mashing the herb and mixing it with enough water to make a paste, or mixed the essential oils with clay dust or dry animal dung. We’d slather the area with it and then wrap it in leather or cloth. Several times a day, we’d change the poultice and wash it with alcohol if we had it, water if we didn’t. It would have worked well for most patients, but if it was racing up your arm in 24 hours, probably not in your case. At that point we’d cut off your arm at some point above the swelling and burn the stump to cauterize it. Again, it may have worked, may not, depending on if the bacteria had made it into your blood.
Yeah, antibiotics are good.
*We don’t call them “antibiotic” if we’re being precise, because antibiotics come from other bacteria or modern genetic modification techniques. Antimicrobials are compounds from plants that kill bacteria, though.
Wow, that’s a good point. I didn’t think about amputation when I was thinking about what historical treatments would be available. That’s a pretty scary thought. I’m glad I live in this era. Where we have more elegant medicines, from a more civilized time.
I had a staph infection that did just this. I have no idea if it was MRSA, I did not go to the doctor. I can tell you, that my whole arm was swollen, and it was dep. Eventually, it came to a head in several places and would puss out when I bent my arm. I do not know why my mother did not want o take me to the doctor. It seemed really dangerous to me, but what did I know?
I assume it was staph. No doctor, means no diagnosis.
It’s funny how we think of bacterial as totally defeated. Since 2000 about 5 people per year on average die of untreatable bacterial infections in the Chicago area. The antibiotics won’t help. Some are only saved by having limbs amputated. (From the Chicago Tribune)
That seems like such a small number still it must be hard for doctors to say “You have a bacterial infection and you’re likely to die.” Especially since we think of antibiotics as magic bullets
The first patient I had die on me came into the hospital with a bacterial UTI (Urinary Tract Infection) and died of sepsis (a severe inflammatory response to bacterial infection). She just fell over dead while my classmate was trying to help her from the chair to the bed. Her daughter arrived for a visit 1 minute after they started a Code Blue (resuscitation attempt) on her.
In 1924, President Coolidge’s 16-year-old son played tennis without socks. A blister became infected, and a week later he was dead. Calvin Coolidge - Wikipedia.
Hey, there’s always maggot therapy (I think, but may be misremembering, that they also offer antimicrobial effects in addition to eating the dead / dying flesh). How’s that for a charming thought!!
Is MRSA any more virulent than a garden-variety bacterium from 100 years ago? I mean, grab a random staph bacteria from 100 years ago, and it’ll succumb to penicillin pretty fast, vs the MRSA which won’t… but would MRSA, untreated, really do more damage than the older critter, untreated?
To my understanding, no. Staph is still staph. While some strains may grow faster than others, the thing that sets MRSA apart isn’t growth rate or some shiny new toxin, it’s just staph that’s resistant to methicillin.
Like **QtM **says, most of us, most of the time can fight off staph infections just fine, and that includes MRSA. Those weird bumps and redness you sometimes get on your leg where you scratched it too hard? Probably staph. Maybe even MRSA. Probably your body got rid of it all on its own long before you needed a doctor. We aren’t scared of MRSA because it’s more deadly, but because when someone can’t fight off a staph infection, we have fewer choices of antibiotics to kill it with - which means we have to use the nastier ones with more common and more severe side effects.
It’s also the first and best known example of antibiotic resistant bacteria that the public has become aware of. There’s others that we’re much more worried about in the hospitals, but they don’t make the nightly news.
IANAMD, but I would think that a doc would swab the wound to find out what the bugs are sensitive to before declaring something to be an MRSA infection.
That’s pretty much what happened to me. They drained it and sent a sample to the lab. In the mean time they started me on the standard drugs. When they didn’t have an effect on the infection, they declared it MRSA. The doc then started me on the more potent medicine. Later the results came back and verified that it was in fact MRSA.
It seems a bit strange though that I’ve never heard of anyone getting a staph infection that wasn’t MRSA. At least, I haven’t heard of one in the last 15 years.
That’ll only be true so long as the antibiotics are in use. It’s likely that if the antibiotics fall out of use (due to ineffectiveness) then the natural strains would tend to dominate, and then the antibiotics would be effective again.
The idea is that the antibiotic resistant strains are only competitive because you have antibiotics cleaning out most of the non-resistant strains, and in the absence of antibiotics, would go back to being predominant
