Word: staphs
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Disease detectives from the U.S. Communicable Disease Center have tried to find who is carrying the infection and how it spreads. Besides the newborn, the old and enfeebled are especially subject to "staph" infections; many pneumonia deaths are suspected (though not yet proved) to have been caused by staph. To fight the guilty strains of germs-which are resistant to most widely used antibiotics-doctors are trying two new antibiotics not yet released for general use, vancomycin and one developed in Japan called kanamycin...
...authors agree, are now firmly entrenched in hospitals. Epidemics usually begin in the nurseries. Since the babies do not bring them into the nursery, where do they come from? Usually, the investigators found, from nurses. In some hospitals, as many as 80% of personnel have been found to carry staph in their nasal passages (without apparent illness). The proportion who carry the resistant strains, causing disease outbreaks, may be only 4% to 12%, but once a wave of infections starts rolling, it is hard to stop. Healthy adults have a high degree of immunity, but its nature...
What to Do? Most of the dangerous staph are immediately found to be resistant to penicillin and streptomycin. They show descending orders of resistance to the tetracyclines (Aureomycin, Terramycin, Achromycin) and chloramphenicol (Chloromycetin). Strains have emerged that show varying resistance to still newer antibiotics. Strangely, nobody knows exactly how severe the problem is because most deaths caused by staph are not so listed. If a patient admitted for heart surgery dies of a staph infection, his death is attributed to the original heart trouble. Example: in Seattle and surrounding King County, only four deaths...
...what to do to fight the staph, the authorities give unanimous advice: ¶ Clean up the hospitals. ¶ Make doctors and nurses scrub up better, use heavier masks, take far more care in many details-e.g., changing their shoes when moving between surgical and nonsurgical areas...
...Sterilize instruments and bedding far more rigorously; staph can live, snug in blankets and mattresses, for months. ¶ Do not give antibiotics haphazardly, and never in small "preventive" doses, which probably serve mainly to encourage resistant staph strains. ¶ When an infection apparently caused by a defiant strain is detected, treat it with full doses of the most promising antibiotic. At the same time, culture the germs in the lab, and confirm (by complex tests) that the right drug is being used. Isolate the patient as far as possible...