VRS found in Michigan
The Detroit Free Press discloses that a 40-year-old woman has been found to be colonized with a Vancomycin-resistant staphylococcus organism. (It was found only after amputation for persistent infection.) This is a major development, one that has been predicted for several years. Detroit, with its high numbers of drug addicts, has been a known point of entry for this disease entity.
Highlights from the article:
Staph aureus is a common pathogen that infects about 400,000 U.S. hospital patients a year. About one-quarter of them die. For decades, scientists have been dreading -- but expecting -- a staph aureus strain to emerge that is resistant to vancomycin.
Some experts postulate that eventually, so many bacteria will develop resistance that antibiotics won't work and hospitals will be filled with people dying from infections, as they were in the 1920s.
* * *
The first indication that staph aureus was becoming resistant to vancomycin came in 1997 in Japan, a country known in medical circles for its liberal use of antibiotics. Vancomycin still could kill the strain discovered there -- but only at a much larger dosage. Later that year, the world's second case of staph aureus with partial resistance to vancomycin was found at Oakwood Hospital in Dearborn.
"We're the capital of staph aureus resistance," Lerner, with the Detroit Medical Center, said.
The bacteria causing the Detroit area woman's infection this year was even more virulent. The emergence of a vancomycin-resistant strain has medical experts concerned that the number of U.S. patients who die from infections may soon exceed 100,000 a year.
"In the scheme of public health threats, this has to rank close to the top," David Ropeik, director of risk communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, said of antibiotic resistance. "It's a serious threat now, and it's getting worse fast. It's dramatically more of a public health threat than pesticides on food."
The article goes on to note that isolation of patients found to be colonized with these "superbugs" may be the only feasible defense.
Emerging Infectious Diseases recently published a study finding that Vancomycin-resistant enteric organisms (the more common problem pathogen) were found in the feces of over 4% of mice and over 1% of badgers. This indicates that these bugs are out there in the wild; they are not rare and isolated appearances.
In his recent Atlantic review of Matthew Scully's Dominion, Christopher Hitchens points out that the traditional Judeo-Christian charge from God to man, found in the first book of Genesis, to assert dominion over the animals of the earth is limited to what we might call "macro-organisms", and did not consider the smallest living things. He says:
For many generations the human species did not at all have "dominion" over other life forms. The germs had dominion over us. And so, until the advantage was slowly wrested from them, did creatures such as locusts.
Hitchens is overoptimistic. The germs continue to have dominion over us. We have only kept bacteria at bay for a short time with a series of antibiotics, mounting in cost and sequentially less effective, and of course we have never been able to kill viruses at all. In the long run, microbes will always be the dominant form of life on the face of this earth.
Further -- Staph isn't the only current item of interest. Here is a series of four items from Drudge tonight:
- BACTERIA HIGH: STUDENTS SUFFER MYSTERIOUS BREAKOUT IN TEXAS...
- USC freshman dies of possible bacterial meningitis...
- Another: Kills PA 10-Year-Old...
- Yet Another Meningitis Death in PA...
11:40:11 PM 
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