Word: staphs
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...there is a greater risk to patients: the inappropriate use of antibiotics for sore throats that, unlike strep, are caused by viruses, not bacteria. Antibiotics, used incorrectly, may be more harmful than the disease itself. Contrast strep's success story with the saga of staph. Staph is also a microscopic bacterium, one that lives on our skin and in our noses but can cause infections that vary from the inconsequential to severe. It causes superficial skin lesions such as boils and styes; more serious infections such as pneumonia, mastitis, and urinary tract infections. Even more serious infections can dwell deep...
...When antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s, infections caused by staph were easily fought. By the 1950s, however, the bacteria had developed defense mechanisms to antibiotics and today they are increasingly resistant. Until recently, these resistant bacteria were found exclusively in the hospital environment, but they have spread to the community - particularly in Georgia, Texas and California. I see children in my office every week with tender, warm boils of pus on their buttocks, legs, arms and even foreheads. Ten years ago these infections were rare and quickly treated with a shot of antibiotics in the office and a short...
...undergo weeks of bleach baths and intranasal antibiotic creams to hopefully eradicate the resistant bacteria that have colonized their skin and nasal passages. Occasionally, oral antibiotics are ineffective and patients must be admitted to a hospital to receive intravenous therapy and sometimes surgical treatment of their abscesses. Unlike strep, staph is alive and getting stronger all the time, with few new effective antibiotics on the horizon...
...ubiquity of staph bacteria adds to the problem. The germs are part of the usual microscopic landscape of your outer and inner skin, including the mucus linings of the nose. Most of those bacteria don't cause illness, and in fact their presence is a good thing, since they can crowd out more dangerous pathogens. But every once in a while, the good guys take a beating, and one of the bad guys, like MRSA, takes hold, colonizing the skin...
There's another factor that makes the community-based MRSA so dangerous, one that has been revealed only recently by genetic analysis. In addition to their normal chromosomal DNA, staph and other bacteria like to mix and match genetic information by exchanging short strips of DNA called cassettes. Some of those cassettes carry genetic instructions to do two things at once: confer antibiotic resistance and make the host even more susceptible to infection. "MRSA is where resistance and virulence converge," says Daum...