Monday, January 14, 2008

Staff Infection Superbug MRSA Hits Gay Men

This news article is scary. The Superbug MRSA invading the public more and more.

"A new variety of staph bacteria, highly resistant to antibiotics and possibly transmitted by sexual contact, is spreading among gay men in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles, researchers reported Monday.

The study released online by the journal Annals of Internal Medicine found the highest concentrations of infection by the drug-resistant bug in and around San Francisco's Castro District, and among patients who visit health clinics that treat HIV infections among gay men in San Francisco and Boston.

The culprit is a form of MRSA, or Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a bug that was once confined to hospitalized patients but, since the late 1990's, has been circulating outside medical settings, afflicting anyone from injection drug users to elementary school students. A strain called USA300 has been a leading cause of MRSA infection in this decade, and an exceptionally drug-resistant variant of it is now on the loose.

The study estimated that one in 588 residents living within the Castro neighborhood Zip code area is infected with that variant, which is resistant to six types of commonly used antibiotics. The risk of contracting this difficult-to-treat bug is 13-fold higher for gay men compared to the rest of the city's population, researchers found...."

Read the rest in the San Francisco Chronicle

Read more about MRSA at WebMD

3 comments:

Feisty Crone said...

Scary article. Thanks for posting it.

Awake In Rochester said...

Yes it is scary. 20 years ago when I started as a C.N.A, hardly anyone was on precautions. Now, you can't go on a hospital, or nursing home unit without seeing several people on precautions for Superbugs. Bugs abound- (ORSA) or M.R.S.A., V.R.E., A.I.D.s, Staff, C. Diff are all prevalent, and generally on the rise. Some of these can lead to death! Nursing Assistants, and Nurses truly have dangerous jobs. Now those bugs are showing up in the community to a much greater extent.

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