MRSA

OK, lots to blog about here now! 

First bit of big news which I found fascinating was the way they stopped the spread of MRSA in a Cambridgeshire hospital. For those of you who don’t know MRSA stands for Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. This is essentially just a strain of Staphylococcus Aureus that has become resistant to a penicillin based antibiotic and is sometimes called Multi-drug Resistant S. Aureus. It is regularly carried by people on the skin, but if infected it can be fatal. 

A staff member had been unwittingly spreading the diseases (Semmelweis is turning in his grave)  and it had been picked up in 12 babies during a routine check. The hospital sequenced the genome and found that the all of the infections were closely related and as a result could quite happily state that they had originated from a single source. This meant that there weren’t just a load of freak occurrences, with an abnormally high proportion of people bringing it into the hospital. 

The ward was deep cleaned (presumably the babies were treated as well) and everything was fine until 2 months later when another baby was found to have MRSA which, when analysed, was from the same outbreak as those before. The hospital then turned its immediate attention to staff that could have been spreading it. They analysed 154 members of staff and found only one who may have been responsible for the outbreaks. He or she was treated to remove the disease.

This could have amazing potential application on a wider scale. You could stop any kind of spreading disease within an organisation by treating those with the disease and analysing everyone else to remove potential carriers. This is a ground breaking approach and could change how we look at epidemics permanently. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20314024

First Aid in Action!

Today was a very eventful day for me because I actually got to use some of the first aid I learned last term!

A friend of mine (M) was running in the common room when she twisted her ankle. She began to walk back towards her seat saying things like "I feel faint", and "I think I'm going to faint". I tried to encourage her to lie down and raise her legs but she said she was fine, and sat down on a chair, leaning forwards to "take a minute". At this point I was holding her shoulder just to be sure. She stayed like this for about a minute or two, not saying anything.

At this point, one of her other friends (A) decided that it might be time for her to sit up again. We gently pushed her into an upright position, only to see that her face was as white as a sheet, and despite the fact that her eyes were open, she was unresponsive. 

I decided that at this point I needed to do something - before I had been a little hesitant to act because yeah, I'd done a course in it, but that didn't make me an expert and I didn't want to make any serious mistakes. I realised now however, that I had to act, so I got A to help me lift her to the floor while someone went to go and get some help. We put her legs on the chair, and settled her, (which is what you're supposed to do) and then stayed with her. 

At this point an adult arrived (K). She was not, it quickly emerged, trained in first aid, but she'd contacted someone who was. K’s first act was to take M's feet off the chair, and to try and get her into the recovery position. I stepped back (I thought she knew what she was doing) but quickly had to help again because K had simply rolled M onto her face.

Thankfully, the big guns arrived, and Mrs H (a trained first aider) turned up. She raised M’s feet for a minute or so, before transporting her to the comfy chairs, where she got her a drink of water, and slightly raised her legs again. M came round and became coherent and after about 20 minutes she went home with her mum.

 I was concerned that M was ok, but I was also pleased that I had been able to help, and I think that now I would be far more confident to use what I learned. I was also surprised that the teacher attempted to tend to her without first aid training. I felt that this highlighted the need for everyone to learn at least some basic first aid and how it can really have a drastic effect.

OK, this is cool

With international HIV awareness day coming up in the not too distant future (1st December), I thought that this was definitely worth mentioning.

There has recently been a publication in the journal "Nature Nanotechnology" which describes a test where a protein changes the outcome of the chemical reaction - basically put, if it's there, the end product is blue, if it isn't, the end product is red. What the protein is though, can be changed. This has massive potential impact, because it allows doctors to test for small concentrations of, for example, cancer recurrence after surgery. 

But more wide reaching than this is the potential to use it to test for low levels of HIV. It's far more effective than the existing methods because it is simple, but it's also very cheap, meaning that these can be used in remoter parts of Africa, where the previous technology was too expensive to use.

At the moment it is a working progress - the clinical trials needed to clear it haven't been done yet - but it is a very exciting idea, and one that could significantly impact the lives of millions.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-20084303
http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.186.html

Beaver night!

I had a meeting with another beaver leader on Wednesday, and we’re organising a pair of evenings for the beavers soon, so watch this space to see how they turn out! We’re doing something to help them get one of their challenge badges so the evenings are based around aviation and I’m hoping (fingers crossed!) to get a pilot from the air ambulance to come and talk to them.

Dr David Nutt

Hi! Sorry I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve been kinda sick and between that and revising for my mock exams I haven’t been on here in a while. This is a post I’ve been meaning to do for some time.

Back in August my family and I went to see a man called Dr David Nutt. I’m not really what his official title is (he’s a professor at Imperial College London, a psychiatrist by profession and he was an advisor to the previous government), so I’m going to call him David.

He was doing a talk on drugs – mainly legal and illegal recreational ones – and I found it fascinating. The main thrust of his whole talk was that science is evidence based, and that the evidence should be allowed to influence relevant government policy.

There were a few main drugs which came under fire in his talk – cannabis, tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, ecstasy, “equasy” and heroin. One of his biggest pet peeves was that the politicians were more swayed by the media than by science, because the media reported things incorrectly and as a result the public was misinformed. One example of this was that the previous government had wanted to make cannabis a higher class drug – move it from a class C illegal drug, to a class A illegal drug. As their advisor the government sent David away to do some research and find out whether or not there was any evidence of this. Unfortunately for them he found little or no evidence to warrant such a drastic change in the class, despite the media’s claims that cannabis caused psychosis or paranoia – he showed a graph of the number of cases of reported psychosis and paranoia against time, as well as the number of people using cannabis against time. There was clearly no correlation – the use of cannabis graph increased almost exponentially, while the psychosis/paranoia graph stayed roughly level. I recognise that this was only one factor and obviously he took more than just this into account, but I’m only mentioning a few of the things he spoke about.

He also did a kind of meta-analysis, and showed the impact to the individual and the impact to society of various drugs. These combined to give an overall score. So for example heroin has a huge impact to the individual – it is an exceptionally addictive and damaging drug to take – but because it is used so little it has a low impact on society. Conversely, alcohol has a relatively little impact on the individual, but people use it so much, and so many people use it to excess that the overall impact on society, and the overall score, was huge. Another graph he showed depicted the overall trend in deaths for all diseases of the organ systems – so there was one line for endocrine system, another for the nervous, another for the cardiovascular etc. The overall trend of the last 20 years was a downwards one (thanks to the huge leaps forward in medicine and science) except for one line – the Liver. This was the only spike in the whole system and it was I think the only line which went up, whereas all the other had gone down. He then showed another graph, same style, but for the whole of the EU except Great Britain, and their lines all had a downwards trend. Because of this data he felt that there should be more regulation on alcohol – he cited a number of European countries which had recognised the health risks and had limited alcohol.  

Another drug which came into the firing line in terms of legislation was ecstasy. He felt that it was largely the media which had made this drug illegal. Leah Betts had taken ecstasy and died, and this was one case which was seized; billboards displaying her in hospital were advertised all over the country. However, she didn’t die because of ecstasy – she died of water poisoning. Having heard that ecstasy caused severe dehydration she proceeded to drink around 7 litres in an hour and a half, and it was this which killed her but because of the media hype and poor reporting, (not many people knew that she died of water poisoning apparently) the government very quickly made the drug illegal. David’s point was not that they shouldn’t have listened, or that it should be legal, but that there should have been some scientific basis for making the drug illegal and that it should have been tested.

He also published a paper on the dangers of a “drug” called “equasy” which actually stood for Equine Addiction Syndrome, also known as horse riding. It outlined how this “drug” frequently led to minor and severe injuries, including but not limited to sprains, broken bones, paralysis and death. He then went on to analyse how many cases of “equasy” came into hospitals per year and how much they cost the tax payer in taxes. He wanted to show that making drugs illegal wasn’t addressing the problem scientifically – when people heard about “equasy” they wanted to make it illegal. He felt that proper investigations should be done into how dangerous drugs were and that the evidence found in these studies should be used to make policies to that effect.

I’ve tried to summarise some of his ideas but I realise that I have done a pretty poor job (it was a while ago). For those of you who get the chance to see him talk, I would strongly recommend it – he’s engaging, funny and very thought provoking. I personally found the divides between policy making and medicine, and the conflicts between them exceptionally interesting as it was something I hadn’t thought about before. If any of you who are interested, his old blog is here, and his new website is here.