[commish]

Drug resistant Staph is becoming a major problem nation wide.

My wife is a Cath-lab nurse, and she says that almost 10-20% of infections they are seeing nowadays are drug-resistant.

Someone needs to find the new "Penicillin" and soon. (Speaking of which, just how did they think "Hmm let me scrap this fuzzy stuff off of this rotten food and see if it cures diseases).

The biggest culprit of this drug-resistant strain are the doctors who prescribe antobiotics at the drop of a hat. Then the patients only take them until they feel better -- if the bottle says "Take until gone" DO IT! By only partially treating the infection you are leaving organisms alive that can now build a resistance to the antibiotic.

[fieldmarshaldj]

"Drug resistant Staph is becoming a major problem nation wide."

I guess some San Francisco denizens will never learn that you shouldn't insert thy sword in thy staph.

[Irene Adler]

My mother-in-law was in the hospital and contracted a staph infection there. They took it VERY seriously and put her on an intravenous antibiotic for weeks. She was sent home with a tube in her arm so that she could go back to the hospital first every day, then every other day, to get the IV antibiotic treatments. It was a pretty fancy antibiotic (I never knew the name). I never realized staph was so serious.

[prairiebreeze]

She's right about the drug-resistant bugs. Also, MRSA has been around for years. Nothing new about it.

VRSA is even worse--vancomycin resistant staph aureus. Vanco is a BIG GUN in antibiotics. When bacterial strains get resistant to it, that's bad.

Prairie

[ExpandNATO]

Someone needs to find the new "Penicillin" and soon. (Speaking of which, just how did they think "Hmm let me scrap this fuzzy stuff off of this rotten food and see if it cures diseases).

The original English researcher, Alexander Fleming, got lucky and was observant. He was culturing staph bacteria for study and found a petri dish that been contaminated with mold and noticed that the mold was killing the bacteria somehow.

The rotten fruit part was later (during World War II) when engineers in the US were trying to find a mold strain that would work well in huge industrial sized processes (apparently the original mold did not produce enough).

Try a google search on "fleming" and "penicillin" and you will get more than enough reading.

[webstersII]

'The biggest culprit of this drug-resistant strain are the doctors who prescribe antobiotics at the drop of a hat. Then the
patients only take them until they feel better -- if the bottle says "Take until gone" DO IT! By only partially treating the
infection you are leaving organisms alive that can now build a resistance to the antibiotic.'

That's not the only issue with antibiotics. Doctors prescribe them as a "prophylactic" -- for people who have a virus such as a cold or the flu, they say they don't want themt to get a secondary infection so they give them an antibiotic. The only patients who need this type of prescription are those with a severely compromised immune system. Of course, many mothers aren't happy when they go to the doc unless they walk out with a prescription, so they are part of the problem, too.

This prophylactic use is more of a problem than people only taking their meds for a short period of time.