More States Require Hospitals To Test For MRSA

Posted on August 12, 2009 by MRSA Lawyer

States are sometimes called the "laboratories of democracy" for trying new ideas long before they are commonly accepted.   At least five states --California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Tennessee  --are now requiring hospitals to test for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and report infection rates.

Legislatures in New York, Nevada, Kentucky, South Carolina, Massachusetts Maine, and Washington State are considering it. At the federal level, Veterans Administration hospitals require MRSA testing.

MRSA infects 90,000 Americans each year and kills an estimated 19,000; more than AIDS.

One MRSA victim, Jeanine Thomas, who successfully lobbied for the new requirement on Illinois hospitals, believes that the testing and isolation of the infected will eventually wipe out the Superbug.

Many infectious disease experts, however, do not agree. All sorts of germs infect 1.7 million Americans in hospitals each year and killing 100,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC).

CDC lists testing upon entry to a hospital as an option, but says there is no evidence it is better than the combination of methods used by most hospitals. These include wearing gloves, gowns, and other protective gear, hand washing, and proper use of antibiotics.

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John Hopkins Center For Water and Health Warns About Antibiotic Abuse By Factory Farms

Posted on August 3, 2009 by MRSA Lawyer

The link between antibiotic use on factory farms and resistance to treatments for infections like MRSA is gaining ground with big time researchers.   The latest to weigh in on the subject is the prestigious John Hopkins Center for Water and Health. 

Consider these quotes from Center Director Kellogg Schwab as reported in the Baltimore Chronicle:

"There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That's a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment."

He adds, "This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me. If we continue on and we lose the ability to fight these microorganisms, a robust, healthy individual has a chance of dying, where before we would be able to prevent that death." Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm.”

Schwab heads the center, a unit of John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He says the danger of breeding resistant pathogens is not widely enough accepted.

"It's not appreciated until it's your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken."

For much more about what the John Hopkins researchers are up to, check out the Baltimore Chronicle.

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