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