A REAL MEDICAL DISASTER

Dangerous drug-resistant staph infections are showing up at an alarming rate outside hospitals and nursing homes in the United States. New research found that in one part of the country, as many as one in five infections were picked up out in the community. Until recently, these hard-to-treat cases were seen only in hospitals and other health-care settings where they can spread to patients with open wounds or tubes and cause serious complications. Now doctors are seeing resistant strains among inmates, children and athletes. Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspected that those outside infections might just be leaking out of hospitals rather than emerging from the general population. But their study in Baltimore, the Atlanta area and Minnesota proved that theory wrong.

Overall, they found 17 percent of drug-resistant staph infections were caught in the community and did not have any apparent links to health-care settings. "Close to one-fifth of what used to be a hospital-specific problem is now a community problem. And that's a large number," said the CDC's Dr. Scott K. Fridkin. "We didn't think it would be anywhere near that high when we started the study." Their findings are published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

In a second study in the journal, researchers reported that drug-resistant staph has acquired "flesh-eating" capabilities and caused 14 cases of rare necrotizing fasciitis in the Los Angeles area. All needed surgery and 10 were in intensive care. The condition is usually caused by strep bacteria, and there has been only one other confirmed case caused by staph. "The bugs are winning, unfortunately, and we need to catch up," said Dr. Loren G. Miller, one of the researchers at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. "We really need to rapidly develop antibiotics to catch up with the bugs and start using antibiotics more appropriately."

Source

My American medical contacts tell me that public hospital cleaning in America is in many hospitals done exclusively by minorities -- who because of their minority status are virtually unsackable. Any attempt to sack one would be "racism". As a result, their cleaning efforts are very desultory. And it is mainly poor cleaning that allows the buildup and spread of MRSA. So America as a whole now looks set to pay a huge price for affirmative action

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation.

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