Superbug linked to flesh-eating disease
James Meikle, health correspondent, April 8,
2005, The Guardian
Doctors have reported an alarming number of MRSA patients being
attacked by a life-threatening flesh-eating infection in the US. The
patients seem to have caught a new form of the notorious "superbug"
outside hospital. Several developed complications and needed lengthy
stays in intensive care and reconstructive surgery. The doctors, who
identified 14 such patients during 15 months at their medical centre
in Los Angeles County, California, warn in the New England Journal of
Medicine that clinicians may not recognise that necrotising fasciitis,
as the flesh-eating condition is properly known, can be caused by MRSA.
That could mean patients not being given the appropriate treatment -
even in areas where MRSA is endemic - since such attacks are normally
caused by a different bug. Although the cases still seem only to have
occurred in one place, they are the latest bad news about MRSA to
emerge from the US, where infections seemingly acquired outside
hospital are now a common and serious problem. They often involve the
skin, especially in children, and may mean that people need hospital
treatment. People who have been in jail, have attended gay massage
parlours or been involved in close-contact sport are among those in
other countries who have developed MRSA outside hospitals. Health
officials in Britain, who may just be turning the tide of infection in
hospitals, are desperate to ensure that the same thing does not happen
here. MRSA, forms of the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium resistant to
antibiotics in the methicillin class, emerged as a problem in
hospitals in the 1960s. The bacterium exists harmlessly on the skin
and in the nose of around a third of healthy people, but can cause
severe life-threatening infec tion in people whose immune system is
compromised. Its effect, until it gets into the bloodstream and
poisons it, is often quite localised. But necrotising fasciitis, which
attacks the fatty layer of tissue beneath the skin, is normally
associated with quite another family of bacteria, the streptococci,
which often spread quickly. The new cases involved people who had a
history of drug injecting, previous MRSA infection, HIV or other
conditions such as diabetes, hepatitis and cancer. Unusually, all the
patients survived the necrotising fasciitis, which typically kills a
third of those who develop it. The authors concede too that the
problem might be caused by a very local specific strain of MRSA, and
that other toxic organisms might be involved. But they conclude that
there is an "emerging clinical entity" with the potential to cause
rapidly progressive disease that is indistinguishable from necrotising
fasciitis caused by other organisms. "Staphylococcus aureus has been a
very uncommon cause of necrotising fasciitis, but we have recently
noted an alarming number of these infections caused by community
associated methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). "The new MRSA has
not yet been identified in this country, according to the government
watchdog body, the Health Protection Agency, but it is carefully
monitoring all suspect cases, including patients who have not recently
had surgery or been in hospital, where the bug is still more common,
or who have been on antibiotics for a long time. Angela Kearns, head
of the agency's Staphylococcus reference laboratory, said that the
risk of contracting MRSA in the community ìremains extremely smallî.
She added that the agency was ìunaware of any cases of necrotising
fasciitis associated with C-MRSA in the UK at this time."
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