Is MSRA Really The Superbug We Should Be Afraid Of?
John Grimme
We're All Going to Die! So says the great sage Homer Simpson every few episodes. Well, the regular media matches him threat for threat with doomsday scenarios. Alas, MSRA is a bacteria you really need to take note of.
What is MSRA? Pronounced "mursa," it stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which explains why everyone uses an abbreviation. In more practical terms, it is a bacteria that is very scary because it is resistant to traditional antibiotic treatments.
The threat of MSRA is not a surprise. The medical profession has been criticized for over presecribing penicillin and such for years. The concern has always been that bacteria would mutate and become resistant to such drugs.
If this occurred, the concern was that we would have no means to stop such infections. The logical conclusion to such cases would be death of the patient. In short, such a bug could wipe out huge swaths of the population of the world.
The scary news is MSRA appears to potentially be such a bacteria or at least the precursor to one. The bug has proven to be very resistant to our most useful antibiotics including penicillin, methicillin, and cephalosporins.
Why can't we tell? The problem is the medical profession around the world. Some areas are less familiar with MSRA than others. As a result, it could be killing many, but being misdiagnosed as other things.
A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association determined MSRA to be the cause of over 18,600 deaths in the USA in 2005. To give you a point of reference, this number is more than the total deaths caused by AIDS in the country for the same period.
The good news with the bug is it has shown an odd trend. Although the media has glommed onto an outbreak in a public school, it is found more commonly in hospitals, gyms and nursing homes. Not airports. Not public areas.
Most of us have a less serious form of staph on our skin. It carries little risk for us. If it evolves into MSRA or is replaced by it, the health risk would be beyond serious. We could literrally be wiped out in a few months.
John Grimme is with AllTerrainco.com - makers of sanitizers that kills
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