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March 11, 2011 08:57 pm PST
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/46gpvZa2yAg/interview-with-autho-5.html
Interview with author of Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA
Maryn McKenna is the author of a new book called Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA. MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphyoloccus Aureus) kills more people every year than AIDS. In the US alone 19,000 die from it each year, and another 369,000 are hospitalized because of it. The World Health Organization calls MRSA the most important health issue of the 21st century. I interviewed McKenna about her book and MRSA. You can read it below. You can also listen to the audio recording of my interview. I invite you to subscribe to a podcast feed (RSS, Subscribe in iTunes) of all my interviews with authors and other people, along with individual podcast episodes I find interesting. I'm using a service called Huffduffer to maintain the podcast feed -- it's really cool.) The following interview has been slightly edited for clarity. Superbug is a really interesting book and it seems like it's becoming more and more timely. What makes MRSA so dangerous? That question has a micro-answer and a macro-answer. The micro-answer is that MRSA (a lot of people just say "mersa") is a form of staph bacteria that have become resistant to almost all of the antibiotics that we use in medicine every day. It's been doing that over about 60 years, largely without our really noticing or understanding how big a threat it has become. It's a threat to people who are in hospitals, but in recent years it's also become a threat to people out in the everyday world. It kind of takes people by surprise. It often affects, for instance, people in gyms or kids who play sports. The macro-answer is that MRSA is the leading edge of a really international epidemic of drug-resistant organisms that are getting worse and worse, both because they're getting more resistant and also because we've, for the most part, stopped making antibiotics. So as as the bugs get more resistant, were running out of ways to treat them, because there's no new drug coming along. And as if that weren't all bad enough, it takes in not just human medicine and how we use drugs there, but also increasingly how we use and misuse drugs in farming around the world. How do people generally get MRSA? It kind of depends on where you are. There are three overlapping epidemics that have happened in the last 50 years. The first was in hospitals. If you think about it, if you were a bacterium, then a hospital patient, especially a very sick hospital patient, would would be a pretty sweet target. Someone who is in an ICU, for instance, has a lot of breaks in the immune protection of their skin, because they've had surgery or have IVs or central lines plugged in. They are probably pretty debilitated. They're being given a lot of drugs that suppress their immune systems, and they are touched and visited by a lot of people who they can't get away from. There's a lot of opportunities to be infected. So people who are in hospitals tend to get infected by other people in hospitals or by hospital equipment. And those bugs are usually transferred from other people or from the equipment by healthcare workers. The trickier part is that people also get MRSA in the real world. And the way that that happens is that the kind of bacterium that MRSA is -- Staphylococcus aureus -- is what's called a commensal -- a bacterium that lives with us all the time. Probably a third of the population walks around any day with regular, drug-sensitive staph. It's on their skin, in their nostrils and other warm, damp, salty places on their bodies. Most of the time it doesn't make us sick. Probably about 1 1/2 or 2% of the population -- about 5 million people -- have MRSA on their bodies. It lives on our skin and doesn't really bother us until one of several things happens: maybe there is a kind of glitch in our particular immune system, maybe we get a scrape or cut the way somebody would if they play sports, or maybe we get a particularstrain of the bacteria and it's particularly good at breaking through intact skin. That's how the community, the outside hospital cases, happen....
Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/46gpvZa2yAg/interview-with-autho-5.html
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