Super Bugs

A RETURN TO THE VICTORIAN ERA?
Superbugs like MRSA present little danger to the majority of us. But they become very dangerous in a hospital environment. This is because of the close proximity of patients, and the fact that patients by definition often have lowered immunity to disease. Superbugs can travel very quickly between individuals and can often escape detection and identification until it’s too late.....

BACTERIA AREN’T ALL BAD ANYWAY …
Our bodies are jam-packed with bugs - in fact 90% of the cells in your body belong to bacteria. Most of these are harmless and some are actually beneficial to our health. So it’s only a small proportion of bacteria that cause illness.

Sudsy know-how
According to Dr. Edith Blondel-Hill, cofounder of the "Do Bugs Need Drugs?" program and infectious disease specialist at B.C. Children's Hospital, hand hygiene products are not created equal. Knowing how they work can help you stay healthy – and can help in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Regular soap, even without antibacterial or antiviral chemicals, soap removes most dirt, bacteria, viruses, and fungi. Wash your hands for as long as it takes to sing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

Antibacterial soaps contain antibiotics, but are rarely 100% successful in killing all harmful bacteria, and have no effect at all on viruses that cause most illnesses.

Antiseptics and micro-organisms have an explosive effect. Antiseptics kill indiscriminately by causing the membranes of bacteria, viruses and fungi to rupture. Great for sterilizing hospital settings, overuse can push organisms to "learn" to avoid these chemicals.

Alcohol: Booze is poison to micro-organisms. But alcohol-based hand sanitizers don't cut through dirt. They are handy to have when plain old soap and water just aren't at hand.

How to Protect Yourself
CA-MRSA is usually spread by skin-to-skin contact with infected people (while playing sports like football or wrestling, for example, as well as giving hugs and handshakes). Doctors recommend these steps to lower your risk:

Keep your hands clean. Washing with soap and warm water several times a day is the single best way to combat staph. Carry alcohol-based hand sanitizer for times when soap and water aren't available.

Cover cuts and scrapes. Any wound should be washed with soap and water, then covered with dry, sterile bandages until it heals. Apply a clean dressing daily. Pus from infected sores can contain CA-MRSA, so it's also important to wash your hands after changing bandages to avoid spreading staph.

Sanitize gym clothing and linens. If anyone in the family has a cut, sore or infection, wash bedding and towels in hot water with added bleach. Wash sports clothing and washable athletic gear with laundry detergent after each use. Drying laundry in a hot dryer, not on a clothesline, also helps kill bacteria.

Remember flu shots. Since the flu lowers resistance to CA-MRSA, getting vaccinated every year helps protect against both diseases. The best time to get the shot is in October or November.

Get tested. If you have a skin infection that needs medical treatment, ask the doctor to check for CA-MRSA, which responds only to certain antibiotics. Many MDs prescribe the wrong drugs because they don't do a test. That can worsen the infection. Until recently, diagnosis typically involved doing a culture. But it takes up to 48 hours to grow the bacteria in a lab, meaning that people could continue to spread the infection while waiting for lab results.

In April of this year, the FDA approved the one-hour Xpert MRSA test, which uses DNA technology to check the nose for the super bug. That gives hospitals a fast, reliable way to screen patients for MRSA before admission. Next year, the test's manufacturer, Cepheid expects approval of a DNA test for use on tissue samples from infected areas, giving doctors another tool for rapid diagnosis.

Be sure to take all your prescribed medication -- even if your skin heals. Bacteria you leave alive today can morph into tomorrow's super bugs.

Superbugs are commonly contagious. Staph commonly resides on the skin of 30% of all people. You can even be a carrier of MRSA or Staph bacteria and not even know it. Washing your hands, keeping wounds and cuts clean and covered, and not sharing personal items like towels and razors with those who have superbug infections will help. However, there is also airborne transmission of MRSA that is little talked about, and hand washing and hygiene will not help.
Green Tea Helps Beat Superbugs, Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Apr. 1, 2008) — Green tea can help beat superbugs according to Egyptian scientists speaking March, 31, 2008 at the Society for General Microbiology's 162nd meeting.

The pharmacy researchers have shown that drinking green tea helps the action of important antibiotics in their fight against resistant superbugs, making them up to three times more effective.

Green tea is a very common beverage in Egypt, and it is quite likely that patients will drink green tea while taking antibiotics. The medical researchers wanted to find out if green tea would interfere with the action of the antibiotics, have no effect, or increase the medicines' effects.

"We tested green tea in combination with antibiotics against 28 disease causing micro-organisms belonging to two different classes," says Dr Mervat Kassem from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Alexandria University in Egypt. "In every single case green tea enhanced the bacteria-killing activity of the antibiotics. For example the killing effect of chloramphenicol was 99.99% better when taken with green tea than when taken on its own in some circumstances."

Green tea also made 20% of drug-resistant bacteria susceptible to one of the cephalosporin antibiotics. These are important antibiotics that new drug resistant strains of bacteria have evolved to resist.

The results surprised the researchers, showing that in almost every case and for all types of antibiotics tested, drinking green tea at the same time as taking the medicines seemed to reduce the bacteria's drug resistance, even in superbug strains, and increase the action of the antibiotics. In some cases, even a low concentration of green tea was effective.

"Our results show that we should consider more seriously the natural products we consume in our everyday life," says Dr Kassem. "In the future, we will be looking at other natural herb products such as marjoram and thyme to see whether they also contain active compounds which can help in the battle against drug resistant bacteria".
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