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Category Archives: community
November 25, 2009
Community MRSA rates rising, and epidemics converging
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A study published Tuesday in Emerging Infectious Diseases makes me happy, despite its grim import, because it confirms something that I will say in SUPERBUG: Community MRSA strains are moving into hospitals, blurring the lines between the two epidemics.
The study is by researchers at the excellent Extending the Cure project of Resources for the [...]
September 11, 2009
A parent’s plea and confusion
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I want to highlight a comment that was left on Labor Day by a woman named Valorie in Arkansas (thank you for reading, Valorie). She said:
I am just now learning about all of this and am very concerned about my 12 year old daughter. We were only 10 days into the school year, and she [...]
June 24, 2009
MRSA and pets
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It’s been a while since we’ve focused on the presence of MRSA strains in pets, and the complications that can cause for the pets’ human owners/custodians/companions (or, in the view of my own two cats, abject servants. No, I will not post their pictures. I have some shreds of pride).
The problem with MRSA and pets [...]
May 12, 2009
While taking a flu break, a MRSA round-up
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Constant readers, the H1N1 (Virus Formerly Known as Swine) Flu story remains a bit intense. I’ve missed a few MRSA stories over the past few days, so here is a round-up.
First, though, if you’re curious about what the swine flu reaction says about our ability to handle a pandemic, you might take a look at [...]
May 7, 2009
MRSA strains crossing borders: US CA-MRSA to Italy
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Swine flu continues to dominate the headlines, but other pathogens don’t read the papers. Case in point: New news about a US community strain being found and treated in a woman in Italy — better treated, as it turns out, than she was in California, where she was infected.
In a new letter in Emerging Infectious [...]
March 12, 2009
New York Times takes up "pig MRSA" ST398
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Constant readers, I know that many of you are very interested in ST 398, the “pig strain” of MSRA that has caused both mild and life-threatening human infections in Europe and has been found in retail meat in Canada and on farms and in farmers here in the Midwest. So I just want to [...]
January 13, 2009
Seriously, a global problem
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Serendipitously, as I was preparing the previous post (an intro to GlobalPost.com, which will be featuring posts from SUPERBUG), an auto-push email from the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed service landed in my inbox.
For those of you whose bedtime reading is not obscure medical journals (I know: This is what you have me for), PubMed [...]
December 19, 2008
Terribly sad story from Florida
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Cody Shrout, a 12-year-old 6th-grader who lived in Daytona Beach, Fla., was found dead in bed a week ago today by his 8-year-old sister.
His death was initially put down to chickenpox, which was circulating in his school, but the Volusia County medical examiner determined Tuesday that his death was due to MRSA.
Two weeks ago, he [...]
December 17, 2008
MRSA and jails and public reaction
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I have a GoogleNews Alert set to crawl for any new posts that mention MRSA. The Google crawler goes pretty deep and often finds things that I would not have known to look for; this week, it has produced a letter to the editor about conditions in a women’s jail in South Florida.
The letter itself [...]
Vast increase MRSA, CA-MRSA infections among kids
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