MRSA

Since I'm going on vacation, I might not get to it right away, but the NY Times has a good article about two studies that appear to contradict each other about various effects to control hospital-associated MRSA infections. I haven't given the two article an in-depth reading yet, but it seems to me that the article which showed no effect seemed to have much higher baseline rates of infection (I'm comparing the infection/1000 patient days in the ICU). Anybody? Also, it seems that without knowing the strains of MRSA involved, one could legitimately get different answers.
One of the reasons I've not been blogging as much over the past 2 years or so is that it's been just insane in the lab. As I was still living off start-up funds and pilot grants, I didn't have anyone full-time to take care of everything, so all the work has been done by myself and a handful of excellent graduate & undergrad students. Happily, some of the initial projects are wrapping up, and publications are starting to come out (I'll be blogging about others in the coming days/weeks). One of them was published yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases: Livestock-associated…
Over at the Worms and Germs blog, Scott Weese has a great post on MRSA testing. He notes the he's frequently asked by human MRSA patients whether their pet should be tested as well, since several studies have documented transmission of MRSA between humans and their companion animals. His first response is always, "why?" One big question I ask is 'why do you want to know and what would you do with the results?' Sometimes people want to know their pet's status to see if the pet was the source of their infection. However, MRSA in pets is typically human-associated, and if a pet is carrying…
Consider this the post wherein I channel my Inner ERV. During the last week, I've come across a couple sensationalist article about E. coli and Staphylococcus aureus being found on common surfaces. Here's one article about shopping carts and E. coli: Researchers from the University of Arizona swabbed shopping cart handles in four states looking for bacterial contamination. Of the 85 carts examined, 72 percent turned out to have a marker for fecal bacteria. The researchers took a closer look at the samples from 36 carts and discovered Escherichia coli, more commonly known as E. coli, on 50…
So Google has released this Ngram thingee that searches for words in all of the archived Google stuff. So I decided to look for the words "MRSA", "staphylococcus", and "Staphylococcus." Here's what I found: You'll note that both staphylococcus and Staphylococcus surge around the same time as the influenza pandemic of 1918. What's odd though is that if we drill into the years 1910-1920, the highest use of both words is around 1913, although it doesn't decrease much until after 1920. Presumably, bloodstream infections (sepsis) from WWI, followed by the influenza pandemic--in which…
When biologists refer to the 'wild type', we mean that there is a dominant phenotype or trait that most organisms in a species possess. For example, most Drosophila melangaster (the fly commonly used in genetics) have red eyes--red eyes are the wild type, while white eyes are often referred to as the 'mutant' phenotype. If there's any good news about antibiotic resistance, it's that the wild type regarding resistance among commensal bacteria (those that live on and in us and that don't typically cause disease) is still sensitivity to antibiotics, not resistance. Only 1.6% of Staphylococcus…
Maryn McKenna has a good article about a new strain of methicillin resistant of Staphylococcus aureus, ST239, aka The Brazilian Clone (as far as I know, no bikini wax is involved...). ST239 is troubling since it's not only resistant to methicillin, but also resistant to other antibiotics, including clindamycin, tetracycline, cotrimoxazole (also known as Bactrim), moxifloxacin, and gentamicin. While cotrimoxazole and tetracycline are old drugs, they have proven to be reasonably effective against many MRSA. So spread of a multidrug resistant MRSA means that we really only have one drug that…
Interesting discussion over at The Spandrel Shop and Cackle of Rad on doing field work in the sciences--and the potential dangers that might be encountered. Now, Prof-like Substance and Cackle of Rad are discussing field work along the lines of biological sample collection, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, which isn't something I've ever done. However, we have our own issues when carrying out our epidemiological field sampling; more after the jump. For new readers, my lab works on emerging infectious diseases, and zoonotic diseases (which can pass between animals and humans) in particular…
No, MR-CoNS isn't some kind of crazy new conservative, it stands for methicillin resistant coagulase-negative staphylococci. CoNS are relatives of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus (the 'SA' in MRSA), and are common human commensals--they typically live on us and in us without causing disease. One of the important things, from a health perspective, about CoNS is that many are resistant to methicillin (methicillin resistance is the "MR" in MRSA). In fact, the resistance mechanism, known as the SCCmec gene cassette, is similar to those found in MRSA (SCCmec is a class of similar, yet…
Via the Journal of the American Medical Association, a report from Spain: the first recorded outbreak, in a Madrid hospital, of Staphylococcus aureus resistant to linezolid (Zyvox), one of only a few drugs still available to treat very serious infections of drug-resistant staph, MRSA. This is bad news. Background: The M in MRSA stands for methicillin, the first of the semi-synthetic penicillins, created by Beecham Laboratories in 1960 in response to a worldwide 1950s outbreak of penicillin-resistant staph. The central feature of the chemical structure of both penicillin and methicillin is an…
So, hi, Scienceblogs. I'm thrilled to be joining the conversation here. By way of introduction, I'm Maryn McKenna, journalist and author and sole proprietor of Superbug, which has been running for 3+ years at Blogger but moves over here today, thanks to an invitation from the Sb staff and some extremely kind support from friends and colleagues who are already here. Superbug began as online notes and digital whiteboard for my new book, SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster), which is a narrative investigation of the international epidemic of drug-resistant staph.…
For several years, health professionals have been concerned about the rise in infections from methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA - a bacteria that's resistant to several of the antibiotics generally used to treat staph infections. CDC estimates that in 2005, there were more than 94,000 MRSA infections in the US, and more than 18,000 of those patients died. The numbers are probably much higher now. A study just published in the journal Pediatrics gives us new information about staph infections in hospitalized US children and how they're being treated. The results show a…
It's supposed to be rainy, so why not attend? Carl Zimmer will be there. MAS does really cool outreachy things like teacher training so they're worth supporting, even if you can't attend. Anyway, this found its way into my email machine: Join the Massachusetts Academy of Sciences as we spend a day at the Museum of Science, Boston celebrating science and our efforts to improve the state of STEM education in Massachusetts! We've got a packed day planned for our members and registrants, and we'd love nothing more than to spend the day with new and not-so-new friends! Interested? You may…
Neither plane crashes nor anti-aircraft fire could kill my namesake uncle, but MRSA did, and it wasn't pretty. Accordingly I take a particular in this nasty bacteria, and am looking forward to reading Maryn McKenna's new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, which I just ordered from Amazon, and which comes out next week. While you're waiting to order yours, you can see hear from McKenna about MRSA, and the new strain's emergence in the daughter of a Dutch pig farmer, in this short video clip: <object width="425" height="349"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/…
I'm conflicted about Nicholas Kristof's recent op-ed about antibiotic resistant organisms. On the one hand, Kristof is one of the only national columnists to raise this issue at all. On the other hand, I found his most recent column somewhat confusing--and I'm an expert in this area (I also think he's jumping to unfounded conclusions, but more about that later in the post). I think this is largely an effect similar to playing "telephone": information is being transferred multiple times from the primary source and finally conveyed by someone with no biological training. So what I'm going…
And you thought fixing the renminbi was bad. By way of Glyn Moody, we find that The Guardian has a very disturbing report about antibiotic resistance in China (italics mine): Chinese doctors routinely hand out multiple doses of antibiotics for simple maladies like the sore throats and the country's farmers excessive dependence on the drugs has tainted the food chain. Studies in China show a "frightening" increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as staphylococcus aureus bacteria, also know as MRSA . There are warnings that new strains of antibiotic-resistant bugs will spread quickly…
The success of a European MRSA surveillance network shows just how stupid, foolish, and short-sighted the Obama Administration's decision to cut CDC antimicrobial resistance surveillance is. But let's turn this frown upside down campers, and look at the really cool website the European Staphylococcal Reference Laboratory Working Group set up. Each of the Google Map pins represents a different surveillance laboratory. If you click on the pin, it tells you how many Staphylococcus aureus ('staph') isolates have been typed. You can then click the "view spa types" link. spa is a highly…
Who coulda thunk it? There are two frustrating attitudes held by a fair number of antibiotic resistance/infectious disease specialists about MRSA (methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus). First, some argue that we really shouldn't be focusing on MRSA, since it's already evolved--the cat is out of the bag. Never mind that this particular cat kills more people annually in the U.S. than AIDS. While we obviously can't prevent the evolution of MRSA (that's already happened), we can contain the problem: we would rather have one percent of all staph infections be MRSA, rather than the…
Yesterday, four people emailed me, asking about Brian Palmer's Slate article about antibiotic resistance. Since I'll probably get more such emails (and thank you for sending them), I'll offer my thoughts below: 1) Palmer's basic point about antibiotic development not being the answer is right. All a new drug does is kick the can down the road, since resistance will evolve to the new drug. Having said that, we currently do need new drugs, so we shouldn't stop developing them. 2) Palmer is not correct about plasmid curing as being a solution to antibiotic resistance. If we come up with a…
It's between fifteen to twenty one cents of every dollar spent by hospitals. A recent study examined the costs of antibiotic resistant infections in hospitals. The main finding (italics mine): The total attributable hospital and societal cost ranges for ARI in the expanded sample were as follows: hospital, $3.4-$5.4 million; mortality, $7.0-$9.2 million; lost productivity, $162,624-$322,707; and total, $10.7-$15.0 million. The total medical cost, if distributed to all sample patients, added $2512-$3929 (16.8%-26.3%) to the mean unadjusted hospital cost for all sample patients. (An aside:…