MRSA infections killed 2300 Canadians in 2006

CTV news reports that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus killed 2300 Canadians in 2006. The Public Health Agency of Canada gathered the data through a national surveillance program undertaken in 48 Canadian hospitals. The data collection samples a cross section of institutions chosen to represent all Canadian hospitals.

An estimated 2,300 Canadians died in 2006 after contracting antibiotic resistant Staph bacteria, costing the national heath-care system between $200 million and $250 million that year, new figures suggest.

The figures, based on data gathered from a, indicate doctors saw 29,000 new patients carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria on their skin or nostrils in 2006.Of those, 11,700 contracted new MRSA infections.

MRSA, one of the strongest drug-resistant bacteria currently known, can live on human skin without causing infection. However, if it gains entry to the body through a cut or wound, it can cause serious illness and death, according to the Mayo Clinic’s website.

MRSA infections are often contracted by patients who are already in the hospitals…

Dr. Andrew Simor, the chief of microbiology and infectious diseases at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, co-chairs the surveillance program. He said the 2006 figures show a slow but steady increase over previous years.

“The good news is our rates remain substantially less than what is seen in the United States and many other parts of the world,” Simor told The Canadian Press.

According to the report, 62 per cent of the new MRSA cases reported in 2006 were acquired in hospitals.

Dr. Michael Gardam, the director of the University Health Network’s Infection Prevention and Control Unit in Toronto, says he’s glad to see this dangerous infection finally getting some attention.

“MRSA has been around for 40-50 years,” he told CTV’s Canada AM on Thursday. “This isn’t new. It’s amazing that only in the last few years is the public starting to hear about this.

“This is the untold secret of hospitals. People can come in for some reason and then end up dying from something they caught in the hospital.”

He said that thanks to the SARS epidemic of 2003, hospitals are slowly but surely improving their techniques for preventing such infectious diseases.

Health professionals also say medical personnel need to be vigilant about hygiene.

“In a hospital setting, infection control is paramount,” said Dr. Donald Low, the senior microbiologist at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital.

“We have to enforce proper infection control procedures: hand washing, these things are now being taken seriously in the last couple of years, whereas before we paid more lip service to it.”

MRSA reaching beyond hospitals

Community-acquired MRSA accounted for 15 per cent of the cases reported in the study. The rest were acquired in long-term care facilities, hospitals outside the monitored network or were of unknown origin.

The rate of MRSA cases acquired outside hospitals has nearly doubled over the past five years, according to Simor.

The strain of bacteria more common in community settings usually causes persistent skin infections, but can also trigger severe pneumonia and bloodstream infections.

The community-acquired cases addressed in the report are not representative of the actual number of infections, as they only include the cases that were bad enough to prompt the infected to seek hospital care — not those treated by a family doctor or in a clinic.

The increase in such cases is viewed by disease control experts as an alarming trend, particularly as they more often involve people who don’t fit the profile for MRSA infection.

This movement is something that concerns Dr. John Conly. Head of the department of medicine at University of Calgary, he has been following community acquired MRSA in the city and says what used to be common only in marginalized groups is spreading to the general population.

“We’re seeing now probably 20 per cent to 30 per cent (of infection cases) where we have no logical explanation,” he said, noting community acquired cases are actually outpacing those stemming from hospitals in a few areas.

According to the director general of the Public Health Agency’s centre for communicable diseases and infection control, more needs to be done to fight MRSA in hospitals and in the community.

Dr. Howard Njoo said containing the resilient bacteria is one of the most important battles to win from the perspectives of both disease prevention and cost effectiveness.

With files from The Canadian Press

The best protection against bacterial infection is frequent hand-washing with soap.

Rhetorical tactics: the Behe Blunder

Wesley R. Elsberry of Austringer makes some very good points about the ways in which creationists and IDists avoid actually respond to real-world evidence. I expanded on one of his ways, which I’ve named the Dembski Dodge.

However, Wesley omits the Behe Blunder: get the science wrong and use that as a basis for argument. In perhaps his worst stumble, Behe declares that the evolution of the eukaryotic cilium or flagellum is irreducibly complex and that those structures are assembled by an irreducibly complex multi-protein system known as intraflagellar transport, which he touts as irreducible complexity squared! But Behe gets it wrong.

As Nick Matzke points out,

The huge problem with Behe’s invocation of intraflagellar transport in his “IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY SQUARED” section of chapter 5 is that he is completely wrong when he says that intraflagellar transport is universally required for cilium construction! Anyone can see this by reading this 2004 paper by Briggs et al. in Current Biology, which they cleverly entitled “More than one way to build a flagellum,” presumably so that people would find out that there is…wait for it…more than one way to build a flagellum….

One of the parasitic apicomplexans completely lacks the IFT genes…yet makes a cilium anyway! … Behe would have known all this if he had only carefully read the Jekely and Arendt (2006) cilium evolution paper that he dismissed with a hand wave…. it really doesn’t help the “irreducible complexity” argument much if Behe’s favorite system, the eukaryotic cilium, and the extra-favorite “irreducible complexity squared” system, intraflagellar transport, on which he bases a whole chapter, is in fact entirely reducible…. A great deal of creationism/ID boils down to sloppy claims made on insufficient information, plus wishful thinking that blocks the impulse to double-check one’s claims…

Which apicomplexan critter is it that builds cilia despite Behe’s declaration that “a functioning cilium requires a working IFT”? Why, it’s Plasmodium falciparum, aka malaria, aka Behe’s own biggest running example used throughout The Edge of Evolution.

Nick Matzke’s entire article, “Of cilia and silliness,” is well worth reading.

LOL Michael Behe:

–from Lou FCD

To read more about Behe’s blunders, read these:

• Michael Behe scores an own goal in court
  
• ERV’s I bring out the best in creationists
  
• Molecular evolution and Michael Behe

Multicellular bacteria

One of the steps along the way to multicellular life is the development of multicellular bacteria. Larry Moran at Sandwalk tells how they developed with special emphasis on plants, which are often neglected in discussions of evolution. Follow the link to read his excellent article.

Sources of snow

Tara C. Smith at Aetiology points out that new research is discovering new facts about things as old and simple as snow. Microbes floating in the atmosphere form nuclei on which water accumulates and turns to snow or rain.

Re-seed your gut fauna

Thanks to Tara C. Smith at Aetiology, we have a review of a peer-reviewed science paper that describes a procedure to replace disease-causing, antibiotic-resistant bacteria with a normal, benign intestinal ecology: the fecal transplant.

For some reason, I’d pictured a kind of dilute brown enema; so I’m happy to report it’s a spoonful of diluted and twice-filtered fecal matter that bypasses the taste buds.

The results are impressive: all 19 patients with vancomycin-resistant Clostridium difficile infections apparently cured. (More about C. difficle infections)

Biodefense Lab overlooked risks

I almost wish this had been in The Onion. “NIH’s Biodefense Lab Review Overlooked Risks of Dangerous Disease Outbreak” It’s the same old story. Errors will occur. People are the weak link. They will fail to follow procedures. They will have accidents. And then there are car crashes and power failures and fires. You must plan for all your usual precautions failing. Putting a lab for dangerous microbes in the heart of a city might be convenient for commuting, but it’s dumb as dirt for disaster.

Retrotransposons explained

Prof. Larry Moran over at Sandwalk explains “Retrotransposons.” RNA viruses are sneaky little things that insert foreign DNA into our genomes. This is my chance to understand those jokes about Gag, Pol, and Env.

Could retroviruses be why a sizeable fraction of humans have mouse tumour genes in their DNA, which makes them more susceptible to breast cancer?

Here’s mention of a paper: Clark, L.A., J.M. Wahl, C.A. Rees and K.E. Murphy (2006). “Retrotransposon insertion in SILV is responsible for merle patterning of the domestic dog.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 103: 1376-1381. (Also SINE insertion in SILV gene.)

Germs mutate rapidly in space

Perhaps that should just be, “Germs mutate rapidly,” and it could be a lead article for my magazine Duh: the Magazine of the Obvious. However, an experiment in the space shuttle last year showed that Salmonella tripled in virulence during 24 hours of reproduction in microgravity, acccording to the Times online. The bacteria were allowed to multiply for 24 hours and then preserved. At the same time, an identical, control experiment was conducted on Earth. Mark Henderson, science editor, had this to report:

Analysis at the end of the flight showed that the salmonella flown in space had changes in the expression of 167 genes. When used to infect animals, the space-grown bacteria proved to be three times more likely to cause disease than those grown on Earth.

The research, which is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified particular changes in gene expression that were linked to an important regulatory protein called Hfq.

This result disproves William Dembski’s Intelligent Design suggestion that important biological changes are too unlikely to happen in a measureable length of time.
The bacterium in question is Salmonella enterica Typhimurium, a particular strain or “serovar” of S. enterica which causes food poisoning. Its genome has been sequenced. (The image is from the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.)