This is my best effort for the b5media’s Science and Health Channels June theme day, featuring “The Sun.” There just isn’t much to say to connect MRSA and the sun – and I really am not the most creative gal on the planet to be quite honest. I could talk about the sun and what it does to your food if you leave it out, but I already did that the other day. Ha ha. I could tell you about my skin cancer that occurred 2 months after Marshall left the hospital after his MRSA horror, but that just doesn’t have much to do with the subject at hand. So, I went on a hunt, and found this incredibly sad story about a mother, who holds a doctorate in Public Health, who lost her tiny baby boy to a horrific strain of MRSA. Read it, and weep, and know how important it is to know of the existance of this bacteria and to do what you can do to avoid it, and help with the problem in general by refusing to be part of the problem and refusing antibiotics unless they are very necessary. The longer I deal with MRSA the more I truly believe we should wipe out all use of antibiotics except in dire circumstances. Our bodies are meant to fight for us without antibiotics, antibiotics should only be used in worst case scenarios. I think.
From the Infectious Disease Society of America: My Son, My Sun: A Mother’s Story of Tragedy in the Face of MRSA
It seems unfathomable that a healthy, hearty, and beautiful little boy could have breathed in such a bacterium–one that attacked his organs by releasing lethal toxins–and in less than 24 hours was gone. MRSA took my son swiftly and totally. Now I have a window into what so many families experienced 50 years ago–the death of a child caused by a bacterium or virus. It is ironic that the same advances in science that led to healthier and longer lives have resulted in the unintended consequence of the creation of bacteria that no longer respond to antibiotics. As long as we do not treat antibiotics as a precious resource, only to be used in the most extreme cases, we will continue to have a false sense of security in medicine.
