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Danger in the Hospital: How to Protect Yourself from MRSA
Advice from Jan Garavaglia, M.D.
Hospitals around the country are loaded with the latest medical equipment and technology to help you get well. Unfortunately, they’re also loaded with nasty bugs-and not the kind that live in your yard or garden, either. I’m talking about bacteria and viruses that can make you deathly ill. I don’t think there’s any place where you’re more likely to get sick than a hospital. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are 1.7 million health-care associated infections every year, and that’s cause for alarm if you become a hospital patient…
Although Hunter Burke didn’t know it at the time, the red spot on his back, which he and his doctor thought was a spider bite, was the first sign that his body was infected with a potentially dangerous type of bacteria known as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a strain of staph that has built-in defenses against many of the antibiotic medicines that exist today. As a result, MRSA (commonly pronounced MUR-suh) infections are difficult to treat. Once it got in his bloodstream and multiplied, Hunter developed severe sepsis. As a result, his blood pressure bottomed out, his heart failed, and he died.
MRSA, first seen in hospitals and nursing homes, has turned up in communities. You can catch it by direct physical contact and, rarely, through airborne exposure. You can pick it up by touching towels, sheets, clothing, bandages, and other items that have been contaminated by a person with the infection. At first the infection is the size of a pimple and is often misdiagnosed as a spider bite. It may remain localized as nothing more than a nuisance infection or turn into a monster, spreading rapidly and turning deadly.
I suspected that Hunter Burke got this infection from another rugby player, since MRSA tends to strike people who are in close physical contact, such as members of sports teams, military recruits, children in day-care centers, patients in hospitals and nursing homes, and prisoners in jails. Once the MRSA had caused the skin infection, it likely slipped briefly into his bloodstream and set up shop in his psoas muscle, a muscle that might have been strained on the rugby field and was therefore vulnerable. When a tissue is damaged, it’s a standing invitation to staph. After festering in the psoas muscle and creating an abscess, the staph spilled into his bloodstream with alarming speed, outstripping his defenses and killing him. Scary stories aside, there are ways to prevent both community- and hospital-acquired MRSA.
The best protection against MRSA or any hospital-acquired infection is simple hygiene: hand washing. Sometimes the amount of bacteria under one fingernail is more than on the rest of the hand. Fortunately, in an age when antibiotics are becoming less effective, hand washing remains a remarkably useful defense against the spread of infection. Don’t let people touch you in the hospital until you’ve seen them wash their hands. That goes for everyone—including doctors and nurses…
While in the hospital, ask all health-care workers who have direct contact with you to wash their hands-even before putting on protective gloves. If someone’s hands are unclean when they put on gloves, the gloves might become contaminated.
Gels are faster to use than soap and water, and they generally do a great job killing bacteria. And gel dispensers are conveniently located, usually inside your room and outside your hospital door. Given the enormous problems hospitals around the world are having with infections, there’s no excuse for health-care workers not to practice optimal hand hygiene.
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Copyright © 2008 by Atlas Media Corp. and Jan Garavaglia, M.D. From the book HOW NOT TO DIE published by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. |
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