He was referencing how many posts it would take to get in the obligatory and always anticipated cheap shot on Fox News.
Television loves to get shots of grieving families on the air. I knew about a guy who died in an airliner crash in Texas, and back in Kansas, his home, two local TV stations called, wanting to interview the family on air. They refused, and one station backed down right away, but the other continued to try and persuade them. The family got rude(it probably felt good) and told them off. I knew the dead man’s sister, she said “the only reason they cared is because he died with a bunch of other people, and the TV wanted a piece of the story.”
Yeah, I would have understood them wanting a human interest story about her and her family. But it was for this story about staph and prevention. Of course one reason she’s kept anonymous is that her dad made it quite clear that they could not use any details.
My roommate got MRSA so bad one time that she was almost hospitalized. I suppose the fact that she wasn’t hospitalized is a sign that it wasn’t super awful, but I’ve never seen someone that sick in my life that didn’t have some super serious disease.
She thought she had a spider bite on her arm and boob, so she let it go for a week. The whole time, she was getting dizzier and more tired and having higher fevers. The second her mom- an RN- saw her, she made her go to the doctor. Sparing the more gory of details, apparently the doctor had never seen that much . . . stuff come out of a staph wound in his entire career. The regular nurse had to leave the room because she was so grossed out and my roomie’s mom (who works in the ER) said she’s never seen anything that bad ever. Heck, it was so bad that on top of giving her the two antibiotics and the third medicine they usually give (slipping my mind at the moment), they gave her Vicodin to take for a week because of her pain at the sites of infection.
While she was gone recovering, I went on an insane cleaning spree. I pretty much bleached our entire apartment- sometimes my nose still burns from the chemical after smell. Everytime I’d walk into a room, I’d spray a cloud of Lysol in front of me and every time I’d leave I’d spray a cloud behind me. Every square inch of our house was disinfected.
Hell, I went and bought hibicleanse and scrubbed myself thoroughly twice a day. I washed my hands and used antibacterial stuff at every turn.
Guess what happened? Yeah, I got MRSA, too. Granted, I probably already had it, but that’s not the point. Lucky for me, I went to the doctor as soon as I noticed the icky cyst and it went away without much scariness. Of course, I did break out in bright red dots all over my body from the treatment meds, so apparently if I get MRSA again I have to go to the hospital for special treatment. After all, there’s no better place to be with a staph infection than a hospital. We don’t know which medication I was allergic to, but my roomie’s mom said that’s the reaction most people have that are allergic to sulfa.
Fuck MRSA, that’s what I say. Of course, that seems like a good way to get an infection in an owie place.
Not to be anecdotal or anything, but a friend got it when she fell and skinned her knee while jogging. Apparently it’s in the dirt??
I’m not a doctor or anything, but it’s my understanding that it’s everywhere. As someone said upthread, many of us carry it on our skin all of the time. My roomie’s mom is an RN, so maybe she gave it to my roomie who gave it to me. My roomie worked at Border’s and was constantly rearranging books, touching people and money- maybe she got it there. I deal with people each day and handle their tax documents- maybe I got it. We both are in college- so maybe one of us picked it up off of a desk or a classmate’s sneeze.
My roommate now pretty much spends her time regularly disinfecting herself- she uses hibicleanse in the shower every day, antibacterial soap and hand sanitizer all the time, bleach on every counter and surface. Personally, I’m much more in the idea that it’s dumb to live in fear and hyper cleaning everything is just going to make it worse for yourself. So, I wash my hands like a normal person and if I see any weird skin looking things (maybe excessive blemishes or whatever), I’ll use some of the hibicleanse or Bactriban I have left. If it’s everywhere, we can’t do a whole lot but use normal precautions to protect ourselves.
I read this story in the news before I went to school this morning. I was talking to a friend of mine there and I noticed an infected looking hole on his forearm. I asked him what it was and when he said it was a staph infection I moved back about a foot from him. He told me he was getting treated for it. Staph infections freak me out and I don’t want to be near anyone that has it. Maybe a little overly paranoid but better safe than sorry.
Seconded. Anti-microbial soaps and other disinfectants used externally are very different from antibiotics taken internally.
Uh, your friend needs to cover his ickiness. Those things ooze and get horrible MRSA everywhere.
CNN is just Fox News with boring graphics.
But journalists have editors and multiple layers of fact-checking, unlike, for instance, bloggers!
/sarcasm
I see about 7-10 new CA (community-acquired) MRSA infections a week. All in skin and soft tissue, all responsive to basic medical procedures like incision and drainage, and treatment with appropriate antibiotics, chiefly the tetracycline or clindamycin or sulfa family drugs. Sometimes drainage and topical bacitracin alone works nicely.
It’s out there, and it’s not going away. And it does cause life-threatening infections a bit more often than your standard Staph Aureus does.
But it’s not the end of the world, the way the news media is portraying it.
Patients need to have a low threshold for recognizing a skin infection and reporting it to their docs. And docs need to have a low threshold for culturing the lesion, draining it when necessary, and putting patients on the right antibiotics, instead of throwing penicillin at it (useless for MRSA), or worse, throwing Linezolid at it (effective against the most resistant strains, but it will become useless if used unnecessarily against the strains killed by simple antibiotics).
And everybody should wash their hands a lot! (I dread winter, my hands will be cracked and sore for the next few months from all the washing).
And bacteria shouldn’t become resistant to standard antiseptics. That’s sort of like humans getting resistant to being tossed into a furnace naked.
I read the article twice, and this is the closest thing I can find that relates to most of the infections being nosocomial:
The OP, and a lot of the CNN stories are pertaining to the spread of fear about children in our schools being prone to infections.
Get your kids vaccinated for meningitis (semi-unrelated). Just my PSA.
I was surprised to learn (listening to the story on MSNBC) that that the reason the bacteria are evolving resistance to antibiotics is,
get
ready
for
this,
they’re learning to avoid antibiotics! :eek: Yup, single celled organisms with brains! :rolleyes:
CMC-fnord!
OMG! They’re also evolving resistance to Fox News!
Of course! :smack: That’s why they’re closing the schools: got to put an end to the learning.
That…is a very good point.
Well, now I just don’t know what the heck to think!
I do agree, OtakuLoki, that closing the schools once a month or so is counter-productive (I imagine that after this emergency shut-down cleaning, they can be arranged on the weekends, though).
I tell you though, here’s the problems with schools…they’re getting old. My school is 31 years old this year, and on our first day back from fall break, half the school went dark because (essentially) a fuse blew. The part, however, simply isn’t manufactured anymore. They managed to do some jury-rigging, but there’s a real fear they may have to retrofit the entire electrical system. Couple years ago they reconditioned the AC system, and the school was closed for three months (which was a problem because we are a year-round school). There are stories of schools with asbestos, with mold, that are literally just falling apart. I can’t imagine the condition some of those ancient box schools in New York are. What needs to be done is a huge makeover of thousand of schools in this country, but unfortunately that’s impossible. So they wait until they fall apart…or a kid catches a superbug.
Bullshit. Triclosan is the antimicrobial used in just about every antibacterial consumer product, and because of this there are now a lot of triclosan resistant strains out there. The big problem there is that hospitals used to use triclosan as a disinfectant and surface antimicrobial of last resort, to kill off the bugs that no other antibiotic can touch. Like, say, MRSA. And now there are triclosan resistant MRSA strains.
In other words, we’re fucked, unless the nation can pull its head out of its squeaky clean, sanitized, and lemon fresh ass.
You are right about alcohol or bleach based disinfectants, though. They may be silly and effectively useless, but at least they aren’t breeding super bacteria.
True. It’s amazing how huge those things get before people come in.
Gah. If only I could get the surgeons and (Og help us) the orthopods to do what they do and leave the antibiotics to me. They see MRSA on a culture and they start nuking it with vancomycin and linezolid as pure reflex. Even when the sensitivities come back and say that Bactrim or doxycycline would be fine, they still want to use the sexy bug juices. They’re more expensive, so they’re obviously better.
Normally, Qadgop, I’d take anything you say without question. This time I’m going to ask for a cite on that.
AIUI unless we’re dealing with things like bleach, or other chemicals that are as harsh on a person’s hands as they are on the microfauna - there’s always going to be a minute fraction of the microfauna population that will survive.
Granted, the anti-microbial additives in anti-bacterial soaps are killing 99.99% of all microfauna on the treated surface, but that still leaves that one hundredth of a percent that survived. And that same one hundredth of a percent is where the population will be restored from.
Which seems to me to be just the same sorts of situations that have bred the various so-called super bugs.
I don’t have a cite for it (though there seem to be others in this thread) but that scenario seems pretty compelling.
I’m not trying to suggest that hospitals stop using anti-bacterial soaps. Given the numbers of people with suppressed immune systems, my understanding is that the immediate risks associated with using regular soap is unacceptably high, compared to the longer-term risks of breeding a super bug. But my understanding of that risk assessment is based upon the idea that the general population will not be assisting the breeding program.
AIUI, for most people washing regularly (and often) with regular soap and detergents is more than enough to prevent disease, and transferring disease. My objection to the flood of anti-microbial agents is that the benefit is much less, compared to a higher long-term risk, than the situation with letting hospitals regularly use the same agents.
Arizona Teach - I could tell you horror stories about schools and their growing age. I’ve worked in a side corner of the HVAC industry, and have seen more boilers I expected to see blow up while I drove off than I care to number. And some of them have been in schools.
Without trying to minimize the way that classroom supplies and teacher’s salaries are getting squeezed in American schools, there are some people making decisions about how to economize on maintenance costs without understanding either the risks, or the trade offs that the maintenance people are presenting to them.