So I just finished reading Superbugs. Good book, good journalism, go read it.
Handwashing Initiatives. I got mixed feelings about this.On one hand, it is cheap and appears to work. On the other hand, it puts the blame on the victim (if the advice is don't panic, just wash your hands), ignores other things and trivializes the problem. On the other hand, 1/4 of medical staff don't wash their hands. On the other hand, if a hospital makes people wash their hands enough, that costs 1 hour per employee per day. That's a lot of hand washing.
Antibiotic Stewardship. This is organizations trying to cut down on the over use of antibiotics, both at hospitals and in agriculture.
Seek and Destroy. This is a program pioneered in Europe, where you assume everyone has MRSA, you find it and decolonize the carrier before you let them in the hospital. It is expensive and people can get worse care in isolation. And big organizations hate it. It was highly effective against nosocomial (hospital originating) MRSA, but failed to protect against agriculture and community originating. Also, seek and destroy only targeted MRSA, so MSSA continued to cause infections.
Report and Track. Amazingly, the federal government doesn't track and many states don't track. They don't know or care if there is an epidemic that kill more people than AIDS each year. VRSA is tracked though.
Antibiotic Discovery Treadmill. This is where drug companies discover new antibiotics, over prescribe them and over sell them to farmers until they become useless.
Vaccination. This is getting our own immune system to do the job that no one else is doing. We don't have a vaccine yet for MRSA/MSSA, but there are vaccinations for other bacteria. Also, there is a relationship between viral flu and MRSA. You get the flu and that makes you sick, but it also sets you up for staph to kill you with pneumonia.
Probiotics. This is strategies that involve using either non-virulent staph bacteria or other bacteria to occupy the bacterial flora of a person so that staph can't move in. Fill the niche and no one else can take it. This is not related
Health Insurance. When the poor can't pay for their drugs or treatment, they don't get treated and become spreaders of staph. They also get sick and die, but a lot of people think the uninsured deserve it, but in the case of spread, staph can spread to people who I suppose deserve their health insurance.
Social Ills are Bacterial Ills. When people are poor, live in dirty conditions are in and out of prison, they get MRSA and then they give that MRSA to rich and law abiding people. But people also think that prisoners don't deserve humane treatment (and the worst prisoners probably don't help) and poor people don't deserve expensive health care that they didn't work for. In my opinion, this creates a sort of real world karma where our treatment of those worse off comes back to haunt us in the form of MRSA infections among the middle class and rich.
Target the Hardest hit. This is medical staff, the poor, prisoners, babies, premature babies, people on dialysis, and so on. But MRSA is also striking healthy people who only had a minor abrasion.
Handwashing Initiatives. I got mixed feelings about this.On one hand, it is cheap and appears to work. On the other hand, it puts the blame on the victim (if the advice is don't panic, just wash your hands), ignores other things and trivializes the problem. On the other hand, 1/4 of medical staff don't wash their hands. On the other hand, if a hospital makes people wash their hands enough, that costs 1 hour per employee per day. That's a lot of hand washing.
Antibiotic Stewardship. This is organizations trying to cut down on the over use of antibiotics, both at hospitals and in agriculture.
Seek and Destroy. This is a program pioneered in Europe, where you assume everyone has MRSA, you find it and decolonize the carrier before you let them in the hospital. It is expensive and people can get worse care in isolation. And big organizations hate it. It was highly effective against nosocomial (hospital originating) MRSA, but failed to protect against agriculture and community originating. Also, seek and destroy only targeted MRSA, so MSSA continued to cause infections.
Report and Track. Amazingly, the federal government doesn't track and many states don't track. They don't know or care if there is an epidemic that kill more people than AIDS each year. VRSA is tracked though.
Antibiotic Discovery Treadmill. This is where drug companies discover new antibiotics, over prescribe them and over sell them to farmers until they become useless.
Vaccination. This is getting our own immune system to do the job that no one else is doing. We don't have a vaccine yet for MRSA/MSSA, but there are vaccinations for other bacteria. Also, there is a relationship between viral flu and MRSA. You get the flu and that makes you sick, but it also sets you up for staph to kill you with pneumonia.
Probiotics. This is strategies that involve using either non-virulent staph bacteria or other bacteria to occupy the bacterial flora of a person so that staph can't move in. Fill the niche and no one else can take it. This is not related
Health Insurance. When the poor can't pay for their drugs or treatment, they don't get treated and become spreaders of staph. They also get sick and die, but a lot of people think the uninsured deserve it, but in the case of spread, staph can spread to people who I suppose deserve their health insurance.
Social Ills are Bacterial Ills. When people are poor, live in dirty conditions are in and out of prison, they get MRSA and then they give that MRSA to rich and law abiding people. But people also think that prisoners don't deserve humane treatment (and the worst prisoners probably don't help) and poor people don't deserve expensive health care that they didn't work for. In my opinion, this creates a sort of real world karma where our treatment of those worse off comes back to haunt us in the form of MRSA infections among the middle class and rich.
Target the Hardest hit. This is medical staff, the poor, prisoners, babies, premature babies, people on dialysis, and so on. But MRSA is also striking healthy people who only had a minor abrasion.
