MRSA crisis spreading

[sharon sanders]

The drug-resistant staph is a monster of our own making. It's taking thousands of lives each year and costing billions of dollars in healthcare.

By Maryn McKenna April 11, 2010




Last month, public health researchers reported that six Canadians -- one in Ontario, five in Saskatchewan -- were infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, drug-resistant staph. That may not sound unusual, but there was something odd about their illnesses: They were caused by a strain that during the last few years has spread through livestock and farm workers in Europe and North America. But the Canadians made sick by the bacterium had no contact with animals or farming; one of them, an elderly woman, had been housebound for several years.

Last week, epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins Hospital revealed that 61% of the children in their pediatric intensive care unit -- kids enduring advanced cancers, organ transplants and tricky infusions of stem cells -- were carrying MRSA, but not the usual hospital strains. Instead, the kids had a strain that predominates outside healthcare and is more transmissible, more virulent and harder to detect than the hospital variety. While they were counting the cases, one child developed a serious bloodstream infection from the community bug, something that would never have happened just a few years ago.

Reports like these are warning bells, and there have been many of them ringing, mostly unheard, for a decade now. Collectively they signal that drug-resistant staph has changed in startling and threatening ways, and that our control efforts, and even our ability to detect it, have not kept up.

more......

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mckenna11-2010apr11,0,4271481.story

[tropical]

Re: Backing away from the MRSA crisis

#1: "They were caused by a strain that during the last few years has spread through livestock and farm workers in Europe and North America."


cage/overpopulation results of human greed:

http://www.instructables.com/community/Antibiotic-resistance-and-factory-farming/

Antibiotic resistance and factory farming

Excerpt:

"The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that at least 70 percent of the antibiotics used in America are fed to animals living on factory farms. Raising vast numbers of pigs or chickens or cattle in close and filthy confinement simply would not be possible without the routine feeding of antibiotics to keep the animals from dying of infectious diseases. That the antibiotics speed up the animals' growth also commends their use to industrial agriculture, but the crucial fact is that without these pharmaceuticals, meat production practiced on the scale and with the intensity we practice it could not be sustained for months, let alone decades.

Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics -- in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we're sick -- would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that "sooner or later" may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA.

A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics).

This month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study showing that a strain of "?�?�?�?�MRSA from an animal reservoir has recently entered the human population and is now responsible for [more than] 20 percent of all MRSA in the Netherlands." Is this strictly a European problem? Evidently not. According to a study in Veterinary Microbiology, MRSA was found on 45 percent of the 20 pig farms sampled in Ontario, and in 20 percent of the pig farmers. (People can harbor the bacteria without being infected by it.) Thanks to Nafta, pigs move freely between Canada and the United States. So MRSA may be present on American pig farms; we just haven't looked yet."

___


Antibiotic Resistance: Playing Chicken With Essential Drugs

http://www.edf.org/documents/619_abr_general_factsheet_rev2.pdf

[Gert van der Hoek]

Re: Backing away from the MRSA crisis

The MRSA-problem as we see in many countries - mostly in hospitals - originates from the human healthcare. Caused by the way in which we use anti-biotics (to often, to much..) and the way we (don't...) apply hygienic protocols.

In livestock healthcare anti-biotics are used too, large scale. This use caused resistance of Staph bacteria too. This "pig MRSA" (a.k.a. "ST 398") jumped to humans. However until recently pig MRSA did not cause infections in humans.

A thing to worry about is the potential for further evolution of ST398 into
a variant that is more virulent and more adapted to human hosts.

Livestock surveillance is very important to monitor this possible evolution. Another preventive measure is: using less anti-biotics, for humans and for livestock.

Last march - in her blog "Superbug" - Maryn McKenna signalled 2 reports, showing "Pig MRSA" indeed can cause human infections: a report from Canada and one from Denmark. In the 1st post of this thread reference is made to the Canadian report.

Now we get a report from France, a previously healthy young girl died. She had pneumonia, caused by a PVL-positive methicillin-susceptible ST398 S. aureus isolate.

The authors write:

"..the spread of S. aureus
ST398 among livestock is a matter
of increasing concern because strains
of this sequence type were able to acquire
PVL genes and cause necrotizing
pneumonia in a young immunocompetent
patient.

Transmission control
and surveillance efforts are urgently
needed to prevent further spread of
such strains."

[sharon sanders]

Re: MRSA crisis spreading

Submitted by Dr. Lieb via email -





DEFEATING INFECTIOUS DISORDERS BY STIMULATING IMMUNE FUNCTION


Stimulating immune function to perform efficiently is the logical approach to defeating pathogens. Such stimulation is propagandized as unavailable, while in reality the potent immunostimulating and antibacterial properties of lithium were documented in 1980. A therapeutic claim is reinforced when the mechanism is known. In this case, molecules known as prostaglandins, when produced excessively, depress every component of immune function, and induce microbial replication. In the early nineteen seventies, my late colleague David Horrobin showed that lithium inhibits prostaglandins.

Lithium is often effective for paronychia, chalazions, bacterial skin infections, urinary tract infections, canker sores, cold sores and genital herpes. Lithium has untapped potential in methicillin-resistant staphylococcal infections, (MRSA) hospital acquired infections (HAIs) sepsis, and pressure ulcers (bed sores). E Coli and Salmonella food poisoning. Long before lithium became identified with treating mood disorders; it was used for various medical disorders. It may be used as a short term antibiotic, and with MRSA the risk/benefit equation would favor its use. Lithium has not been developed as an anti-infective because it is inexpensive, and cannot be patented.


Julian Lieb, M.D

Lieb, J.”The immunostimulating and antimicrobial properties of lithium and antidepressants.” J Infection (2004) 49 88-93

A complete bibliography is available in “Stimulating immune function to kill viruses.” (and bacteria, parasites, and fungi) (2009) Amazon

These comments are intended for education only. All treatment decisions should be made with a physician.


I'm a semi-retired, former Yale medical school psychiatry professor, and author or coauthor of forty- eight articles and eleven books.

[Gert van der Hoek]

Re: MRSA crisis spreading

Whole genome analysis of a livestock-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ST398 isolate from a case of human endocarditis

Department of Medical Microbiology, University Medical Centre Utrecht, Heidelberglaan 100, 3508 GA, Utrecht, the Netherlands

Received December 1, 2008; Accepted June 14, 2010


Conclusions

The absence of virulence factors may explain why MRSA ST398 isolates have caused relatively little disease until now.

However, the hypothesized enhanced ability of MRSA ST398 to acquire mobile genetic elements may also result in the uptake of mobile elements that encode virulence genes. For example, the first Panton-Valentine Leukocidin (PVL)-positive MRSA ST398 isolates have recently been reported [9,16,45].

Considering the vast and increasing animal and human reservoirs, we believe it will only be a matter of time before more of these isolates acquire mobile genetic elements that carry virulence factors which will increase virulence in the human host.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2900268/