Of the myriad complications of my end-stage renal disease, my severely compromised immune system is the one that keeps me up at night. Couple that with dialysis treatments in a facility that is basically a Petri dish with doors, and news of a new super staph bug sets my teeth on edge.
The bacterium, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), has been around for more than 30 years in hospitals and is only now starting to show up in the general population: fully one third of the population carries the bacteria in their nasal passages or on their skin. Resistant to most antibiotics—including the super-antibiotics like vancomycin—this particularly nasty staph germ can be fatal if it gets in the blood stream, heart, or lungs.
Not that that’s particularly good news, but the bad news is that infectious disease experts predict that 40% of staph infections will be vancomycin-resistant by 2010. From Catherine Arnst’s report in Business Week:
“The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention estimates that the incidence of drug-resistant staph infections in intensive-care units, where they are most dangerous, doubled from 1987 to 1997. In England, British Medical Journal reported in February that 800 people died from drug-resistant staph infections in 2002, vs. 51 in 1993. Cases have also spiked in Japan, where in March three patients died of staph infections at the same hospital.
“But it’s the migration of drug-resistant staph out of hospitals that has epidemiologists most on edge. Alarm bells went off among infectious-disease specialists in 1999 when four healthy children in Minnesota and North Dakota died from MRSA infections, even though none had been anywhere near a hospital. There is no national database to track community-based infections, but anecdotal reports have poured in about breakouts in military barracks, athletic clubs, and prisons.”
Worst of all, the scientific community can’t seem to figure out why or how the new super staph has gotten out of the hospitals and into the general population.
Faint hope arrives in the form of a vaccine, StaphVAX, from Boca Raton, Florida-based Nabi Biopharmaceuticals. A clinical trial of 1,804 end-stage renal disease patients cut staph infections by 57% but the vaccine stopped working after ten months.
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