Sorry for another Debbie Downer post, especially on the heals of news about the ban on vital organ donations from gay men, but I must report on new (and quite disturbing) findings by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).The study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine warns that gay men in San Francisco are 13 times more likely to be infected with a new more potent strain of the multidrug-resistant Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus (MRSA), known as MDR staph. According to epidemiologist Binh An Diep, the first author of the study, about 20 percent in San Francisco and up to 50 percent in Boston "are infected with this more-difficult-to-treat form of USA-300 [MRSA]."
Sound serious? Well, it can be deadly since MDR is more resistant to antibiotics than the already resilient MRSA, which thwarts off common antibiotics like methicillin, oxacillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. Since MRSA cowers little to common antibiotics, doctors use vancomycin and Bactrim to kill off the staph. However, the new MDR strain is showing resistance to those antibiotics as well.
Staph bacteria invades the skin and tissue beneath the skin which can cause boils that lead to life-threatening infections. MRSA and its new sibling MDR can be transmitted by skin-to-skin contact. They can also be contracted through sexual encounters and indirect contact such touching towels, sheets, wound dressings, clothes, benches, sports equipment. Staph can also live in and around the nose, on skin and the anus. So far, 3,800 people in San Francisco are infected.
Staph isn't a new outbreak. Health mag The Body ran a story back in 2003 about the an onslaught of staph infections among gay men in Atlanta and L.A. They also mentioned that since 1997, groups such as prison inmates and members of athletic team (even professional athletes) had contracted the drug-resistant infection. (read more)
And according to a February 2007 report by Gay City News, New York has seen an increase in staph outbreaks since as early as 2004. A mid 2005 study launched by the New York City health department showed that 65 percent of the 500 evaluated cases of staph were among men and 65 percent of those were men who have sex with men. (read more)
Some worry that the new study in Annals of Internal Medicine about super staph will replicate into another gay stigma. Widespread perceptions of a new "gay disease" is also of concern to the authors of the paper.
"We are worried about the fact that this could be taken to mean that this is another gay man plague," Diep says. "This is really not what we want to push forth here. I think there's a message of hope -- that just soap and water is the best defense against community-acquired MRSA infection."
Images: Scanning electron microscopy of Staphylococcus epidermidis. © National Institutes of Health. Water faucet. © Lance Hancock.
Soap and Water can protect us? I’m not sure what the end of the article meant….
The author of the study Binh An Diep is suggesting that since you can get staph from practically any public surface, frequent hand washing is the best way to prevent contraction.
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