MRSA Notes

This is a hard story to refute - three young men all got tattoos together at Lil Smitty’s, a Blue Island, Illinois tattoo parlor, and all three broke out with MRSA staph infections all over their brand new art. Illinois is soon going to be implimenting a new law for tattooing shops that will [...]

A speedy minute of health from the CDC this week covers Staphylococcus aureus quick and dirty in a podcast on the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and can be accessed here. Here you can find the PDF transcript, but one short minute of a podcast doesn’t give you much info - here it is:

Antibiotic [...]

This is a video from Dr. Mercola about probiotics - which are the good bacteria that lives in your system. I have written more information about probiotics and how they relate to your MRSA, and you can read more about Dr. Mercola’s probiotics as well. He is trying to sell you his probiotics [...]

Do you know the difference between a bacteria and a virus? How about a virus and a fungus? Do you throw all of these words around interchangably, or maybe just call them all “germs?”
Well, germs they certainly all are. Mayo Clinic has a great article talking about what all these infectious [...]

Nah, Im not talking about natural selection selecting us hu-mans out, but the process of natural selection that keeps bacterial and viral infections growing stronger and more resistant all the time.
While not directly related to MRSA, this article regarding some research done in Vancouver on disease transmission and the survival of the fittest bugs was [...]

A University of Missouri-Kansas City researcher has discovered an important element of how Staphylococcus aureus disables the body’s immune system. Normally, when a threating bacteria enters the body, the body sends immune system protiens that break into smaller protiens and trigger the body’s further immune system defense. Staph bacteria produces a protien calle [...]

If you need any sort of a surgical procedure, you run the risk of getting an infection, but there are many things you can do that will help prevent getting an infection. Please don’t be afraid to ask that these guidelines are followed. There is nothing in here that is unreasonable to ask [...]

These are just a few general MRSA informational links that have popped up across the web over the last week - basic MRSA knowledge - worth a look:
MRSA Infections Becoming Resistant (US - Los Angeles)
MRSA Cases on the Increase (UK)
Infection Adapts to Human Resistance (US - Indiana)
California, Education, Indiana, MRSA, MRSA in the U.S., [...]

Mike, The Mad Biologist , recently attended a Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus meeting, and came out with some new statistics that you will want to see. Here are a couple of highlights, be sure and read the whole story at Mike’s blog:

43% of all skin infections in the U.S. are the result [...]

The lifesaving antibiotic for MRSA, Vancomycin, has been linked to thrombocytopenia, a disorder that affects the platelet numbers in the blood, and therefore the blood’s ability to form clots and stop bleeding, according to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
What does this mean for you? This is yet another important [...]