MRSA will probably give me nightmares tonight, considering I just spent an hour watching videos about it!! Without trying to scare you all, I think this video was quite interesting. I thought MRSA was mostly passed through unhygenic hospital care but apparently it can be found in many places. Sports locker rooms are at high risk and therefore should be cleaned regularly. There is now also a treatment spray that can be applied to the facility. Not only can MRSA be found on inanimate surface objects it can also be found within man's best friend. So everyone call your parents after you watch this video and tell them to get the dog washed before you come home. Enjoy the video, its short and sweet (if you can call it that)!
http://www.nypost.com/video/?vxSiteId=0db7b365-a288-4708-857b-8bdb545cbd0f&vxChannel=General&vxClipId=913022&vxBitrate=300
3 comments:
Oh those furry rascals... Wait 'till tomorrow though. Then we'll hear the real truth about cats and dogs. And it ain't pretty...
This whole issue is very interesting to me because the media often seem to do a good job explaining the problem and then draw an entirely incorrect conclusion - that we need to wipe out the bacterial menace with antibacterial products.
MRSA is indeed a threat - but mainly in hospitals. Community acquired MRSA is far less abundant. If we increase our use of ant-bacterial products (have you seen the number of products that have 'anti-bacterial properties these days?) then we will just select for resistance and the problem will get a whole lot bigger.
Manufacturers of such products claim that the mode of action is very different to antibiotics but some of the resistance mechanisms that are selected for are very general (eg a thicker bacterial cell wall or an efflux pump).
This presentation, Antibacterial Household Products: Cause for Concern by Stuart Levy, from the 2000 Emerging Infectious Diseases Conference in Atlanta, Georgia and on the CDC webpage is a good overview of the resistance issue in antibacterial products.
Yesterday my friend told me that she went to Student Health and got antibiotics for having MRSA in her bellybutton due to a recent piercing!
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