Deadlier than AIDS and Iraq combined
A “strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year,” according to the WaPo:
MRSA, which is spread by casual contact, rapidly turns minor abscesses and other skin infections into serious health problems, including painful, disfiguring “necrotizing” abscesses that eat away tissue. The infections can often still be treated by lancing and draining sores and quickly administering other antibiotics, such as bactrim. But in some cases the microbe gets into the lungs, causing unusually serious pneumonia, or spreads into bone, vital organs and the bloodstream, triggering life-threatening complications. Those patients must be hospitalized and given intensive care, including intravenous antibiotics such as vancomycin.
In the new study, Fridkin and his colleagues analyzed data collected in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, Oregon and Tennessee, identifying 5,287 cases of invasive MRSA infection and 988 deaths in 2005. The researchers calculated that MRSA was striking 31.8 out of every 100,000 Americans, which translates to 94,360 cases and 18,650 deaths nationwide. In comparison, complications from the AIDS virus killed about 12,500 Americans in 2005.
None of the stories we have seen have speculated on the reason for this sudden and extremely serious situation. We note this story in the Washington Times, which reports on a, no doubt, completely unrelated phenomenon: “A Mexican national infected with a highly contagious form of tuberculosis crossed the U.S. border 76 times and took multiple domestic flights in the last year, according to Customs and Border Protection interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Times.”
It would be rude, as well as politically incorrect, to suggest that the millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, from unhygienic nations who regularly cross America’s open borders, and who routinely use emergency rooms for primary care, could account for the dramatic increase in certain infections and diseases.
October 18th, 2007 at 5:39 am
Unfortunately this situation was not “sudden” though it is very serious.
Getting the MSM to cover this deadly bug has been impossible.
Hospitals are evidently very big advertisers.
Hospital aquired infections of which MRSA is probably the forerunner, have been killing people at a phenomenal rate for years.
Our hospitals have cultivated and spread MRSA by shear negligence, filth, understaffing, mis use of antibiotics.
It would be interesting to find some numbers on MRSA in Mexico. It is a big problem in Canada though they aren’t rushing our borders.
Soldiers and contractors wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have been picking up another Superbug in the military medical system, Acinetobacter baumannii. These strains of Ab are nearly completely resistant to every antimicrobial available. They have spread this superbug throughout the military medical system, the VA system, the National Institute for Health, our civilian hospitals all across our country.
There is also Vancomycin Resistant Enterococcus, C. Diff, and more.
Worst, many patients are being infected with two or three of these at one time.
Marcie Hascall Clark http://www.iraqinfections.org