MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, but is shorthand for any strain of Staphylococcus bacteria which is resistant to one or more conventional antibiotics
MRSA infections can cause a broad range of symptoms depending on the part of the body that is infected. These may include surgical wounds, burns, catheter sites, eye, skin and blood.
Infection often results in redness, swelling and tenderness at the site of infection. Sometimes, people may carry MRSA without having any symptoms
The advice from doctors who give you antibiotics is always to finish the entire course - advice which many of us ignore.
When you don’t finish the course, there’s a chance that you’ll kill most of the bugs, but not all of them - and the ones that survive are of course likely to be those that are most resistant to antibiotics.
Over time, the bulk of the Staph strains will carry resistance genes, and further mutations may only add to their survival ability.
Strains that manage to carry two or three resistance genes will have extraordinary powers of resistance to antibiotics.
The reason that hospitals seem to be hotbeds for resistant MRSA is because so many different strains are being thrown together with so many doses of antibiotics, vastly accelerating this natural selection process.
Hygiene is another tried and tested way of at least protecting the most vulnerable patients from the most dangerous strains.
Hand washing between patients should be a must for doctors and nurses, or they are simply doing more harm than good in their trips around the wards.
Visit www.medstore.ie for a list of products that can help with the prevention of MRSA
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