Now an army of six bacteria called “ESKAPE bacteria“ (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella species, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Enterobacter species) are among the biggest threats of infectious diseases physicians face today. These bacteria are now resistant to most antibiotics, antibacterial wash and antiseptics used in hospitals.

Recently published data about hand washing makes it more difficult to recommend this to prevent spreading infections. Healthcare workers washing hands for more than ten times develop dermatitis and have higher bacterial count than the ones who wash less. Using antibacterial wash is making infection control more difficult.

We must first reduce routine invasive procedures and blood tests performed in hospitals to help reduce contaminated hospital waste that spread infections. People who consult doctors must also learn not to demand blood tests and antibiotics, if not this are likely to be a major war, which we will not win.

Please visit my website medifix.co.uk and keep posting. I’ve linked this page to help educate people.

C.diff does not release spores. It becomes a spore when it encounters adverse conditions and can live for long periods of time on surfaces. It is hard to kill but not impossible. As I said before wash your hands with soap and water.

C.diff is common enough and well known. Like MRSA a large percentage of the population is colonised with it and have no symptoms. it lives in the gut and in normal conditions is pretty harmless. The problem occurs when someone is on antibiotics that wipe out of damage the natural flora of the gut allowing C.diff to take over and become the predominant bacteria. Then it can be deadly and is much much harder to treat than MRSA.

Clearly, though, many if not most people who contract MRSA in a hospital are probably very ill to begin with, so ascribing a true cause of death is debatable. But that it’s even 20k per year, officially, as it was in 2005,is too many. I don’t think you will argue that it’s actually less than that…

A secondary problem is the fact that once infected, a person can continue to carry it, in essence to be colonized by it, and be reinfected. I am one such person. After a 3.5 month ear infection which spread to my eye and some more sensitive mucosa, I found a doctor who was familiar with MRSA and its treatment. I now know to tell any physician treating me that I’m prone to MRSA and what to prescribe. Very few question me, but none refuse.

As for resistance due to antibiotic use, SciAm published an article showing that far more resistance occurs due to natural swapping of RNA between micro-organisms, and from their interactions with natural resistance compounds in various organisms. Resistance due to antibiotic overuse does occur, but it’s the minority case. Figure: ‘new’ diseases, including more virulent forms of existing ones, have been occurring far longer than antibiotics have been used, even if one includes “natural” antibiotics as studied in ethnobotany.

20% to 30% death rate? You’re running around with your hair on fire. For real data on things medical, always go to PubMed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez … but pack a lunch and reading glasses. People who contract MRSA are twice as likely to be dead a year later than those who contract MSSA (methicillin susceptible staph, the normal kind), and staph contracted in a health care setting is twice as likely to be MRSA (but due to invasive procedures not found outside such settings, rather than setting-dependent prevalence). The mortality difference is due to the previously mentioned identification problem. SA infections altogether remain a very small minority of mortality causes.

The most promising news with respect to MRSA is that the staph proteome has been fully sequenced. New identification procedures, drugs and delivery methods are in the works.

http://www.scopus.com/scopus/record/display.url?eid=2-s2.0-0032951278&view=basic&origin=inward&txGid=ZIrL8ux6WjbaBFaK00fMIxq%3a2

It would seem to imply that the use antibiotics does have an effect on resistance. I’m not sure how closely related vanc and avoparcin are, but it’s interesting that they aren’t necessarily using the same drug the resistance was seen in. Of course this is gut bacteria.

If you are in a hospital it is worth putting a 10 foot sign beside your bed that says “don’t even think about touching me, if you haven’t just washed your hands”