MRSA Notes

“We really are in a desperate situation. We need more bullets, and we need them yesterday,” says John Quale, who treats drug-resistant infections at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. “The bacteria are winning right now,” adds Paul Miller, who directs antibiotic research at Pfizer. Robert Moellering, an infectious-disease specialist at Harvard Medical School, issues this alarm: “More and more bugs are becoming dangerously close to untreatable.”

Forbes Magazine has a cover story about MRSA online now - and has taken the threat of MRSA one step further and created a fictional, but possible, situation where the Bird Flu has ravaged the world’s immune systems and Staphylococcus aureus is running rampant. A situation that is not good and hopefully will not happen, but is certainly being proposed to demonstrate the problem with the lack of effective antibiotics. And this definitely is a problem.

Amongst the panic mongering is a very good history of antibiotics, and good coverage on where we are with new antibiotics coming down the pipeline. You will also find the stories of a couple of people affected by MRSA - one, my dear friend Maureen Daly, who lost her mother, Johanna, to hospital acquired MRSA two years ago, and another of Jewaun Smith, an 8 year old who’s scraped up knee let a particularly virulent strain of CA-MRSA in his tiny little body. Jewaun miraculously recovered from a horrendous ordeal, thankfully.

Thank you Forbes, and reporters Robert Langreth and Matthew Herper, for bringing some attention to this important cause! Graphic about antibiotic resistance from the article at Forbes.

CA MRSA, Forbes, HA MRSA, Johanna Daly, MRSA, MRSA in the U.S., RID

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