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Please be advised that Staphylococcus Aureus and a couple of other species of "Staph" are most likely all around and upon everyone since time immemorial, even up your noses. Every now and then, these bacteria get through a break in the skin in sufficient numbers and cause really nasty infections including fatal ones.

There are a few steps that if everyone observed the problem would be less severe.

First is adequate cleaning of all wounds. The problem here is that many wounds are ignored or not even noticed for a variety of reasons.

The next two are inter-related between patients and doctors and involve the inadeqate use or overuse of antibiotics, which in their most common usage are actually antibacterial drugs.

An infection can be caused by a variety of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. When a doctor gives an antibacterial drug like penicillin for an common cold or sore throat caused by a virus, it fosters drug resistance to penicillin in all the other bacteria that are colonizing that person who has a normal immune system , as well as nothing to fight the viral infection. This happens most commonly when a patient demands an antibiotic and the doctor acquiesces either for he/she doesn't have time to explain to the patient or fear of losing a patient with good insurance. The other most common reason for developing drug resistance is that a patient stops taking an appropriately prescribed drug because the patient is feeling sufficiently better before the infecting organism is completely killed off.

Drug resistance is inevitable with the use of antibiotics and has to be limited to appropriate infections. Methicillin Resistant Staph Aureus(MRSA) has evolved because of this phenomena. Methicillin is a semi-synthetic penicillin, i.e. it was derived from penicllin. It is a very commonly acquired organism in hospitalized patients who have intravenous(IV) catheters. If infected with MRSA, the patient is treated with Vancomycin which is totally unrelated to the penicillin class of antibiotics and is reserved for the most severe infections. Every hospital probably has MRSA coating its surfaces somewhere. The only way to suppress MRSA is adequate disinfectant application, adequate hand washing by medical and nursing staff, and changing IV lines and access sites every 72 hours, IIRC.

I hope I didn't bore you or lose you.

Not at all, many thanks for the info.

Am unfamiliar with the specifics in Westfall's case, but I know my father's case all too well. Broke his leg seriously (3 fractures, 2 simple, 1 compound), was in a hip-length cast for upwards of 3 months. For reasons known to no one, the doctors did NOT remove and reset the cast at all during this period. Unlucky, because he picked up SA under the cast somehow, and in that nice warm moist growing environment, it prospered far too thoroughly.

I'm no bloody MD, but when I wore a hip-length cast back in 1972 for a similar (but not nearly as serious) fracture, and had it for a total of 5 months, it was cracked open and reset TWICE...and the stated reason for doing so was exactly to check for possible infection. Made sense to me at the time, so what's changed? As you may readily imagine, I and my sister are absolutely furious with these clowns. This was a COMPLETELY preventable result, no second-guessing required.