Word: bacterias
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...Louisa May Alcott's era, a diagnosis of scarlet fever could only be made by clinical deduction; the distinctive rash accompanied by fever, nausea, vomiting and a sore throat. In my office practice, I swab throats daily looking for the dreaded strep bacteria and "rapid strep tests" allow concrete diagnoses to be made in a matter of minutes. Although the National Institute of Health estimates that more than 10 million mild infections caused by strep are diagnosed each year, the serious consequence of untreated strep infections are extremely rare in the U.S. Treatment for strep consists of oral antibiotics...
...there is a greater risk to patients: the inappropriate use of antibiotics for sore throats that, unlike strep, are caused by viruses, not bacteria. Antibiotics, used incorrectly, may be more harmful than the disease itself. Contrast strep's success story with the saga of staph. Staph is also a microscopic bacterium, one that lives on our skin and in our noses but can cause infections that vary from the inconsequential to severe. It causes superficial skin lesions such as boils and styes; more serious infections such as pneumonia, mastitis, and urinary tract infections. Even more serious infections can dwell deep...
...ubiquity of staph bacteria adds to the problem. The germs are part of the usual microscopic landscape of your outer and inner skin, including the mucus linings of the nose. Most of those bacteria don't cause illness, and in fact their presence is a good thing, since they can crowd out more dangerous pathogens. But every once in a while, the good guys take a beating, and one of the bad guys, like MRSA, takes hold, colonizing the skin...
Even when that happens, it doesn't necessarily signal an emergency. The skin, after all, is an effective barrier against many kinds of threats. But anytime you get a break in that barrier--even a tiny cut--there's a chance some bacteria will get inside and infect the wound. What makes MRSA germs particularly dangerous is that they excrete a potent toxin that attacks the skin, causing an abscess that's often mistaken for a spider bite. Normally, the body can wall that area off. But if the infection spreads, treatment with antibiotics may be called...
There's another factor that makes the community-based MRSA so dangerous, one that has been revealed only recently by genetic analysis. In addition to their normal chromosomal DNA, staph and other bacteria like to mix and match genetic information by exchanging short strips of DNA called cassettes. Some of those cassettes carry genetic instructions to do two things at once: confer antibiotic resistance and make the host even more susceptible to infection. "MRSA is where resistance and virulence converge," says Daum...