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Bacteria on the Loose

Tuesday's New York Times reported the bacteria known as Staphylococcus aureux or staph, is resistant to pencillin-like antibiotics, the standard treatment for staph-related infections. Staph is often the cause of skin infections (boils) and can be implicated in bloodstream and lung infections.

While staph infections and staph-resistant infections are well-known problems in hospitals, it is just now that otherwise healthy patients have been struck by resistant bacterial infections. Although healthy patients can recover from staph without necessarily taking antibiotics, the emergence of a newly resistant strain is of concern:

The outpatient strains are biologically different from hospital strains, and the collections of genes that cause antibiotic resistance in the new strains are quite different from those that cause it in the older strains.

Another ominous difference between the new resistant staph and the old hospital strains is that the new staph strains appear far more likely to manufacture a toxin that can destroy the white blood cells that normally fight off infection, allowing the bacteria to eat through human tissue.The news is resistant bacteria is being found among otherwise healthy patients;