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Antibiotic-Resistant Bacterial Threats (MRSA and others)

The development of antibiotic resistant bacteria has become a life threatening global health problem and a number of related diseases (e.g. MRSA) are being spread through skin contact. This has happened primarily because we have abused antibiotics by over-prescription and because bacteria have an amazing ability mutate and adapt. At the same time, an increasing number of serious viral threats are also transmitted by skin contact. While we must address the antibiotic over-prescription part of this problem, and strive to support our immune systems naturally, we also need to immediately upgrade our hygiene, personal care and sanitizing tools dramatically. We then need to use them diligently, and teach our children to do the same. In the spirit of doing this as effectively,safely and naturally as possible, we bring you our Honeymark and PureGreen24 lines.

Please take the articles seriously, and then use and sell our products in good health:

Published Thursday January 22, 2009

Rise in pediatric infections 'alarming' CHICAGO (AP)

Rise in pediatric infections 'alarming' CHICAGO (AP) — Researchers say they have found an "alarming" increase in children's ear, nose and throat infections nationwide caused by dangerous drug-resistant staph germs. Other studies have shown rising numbers of skin infections in adults and children caused by these germs, nicknamed MRSA, but this is the first nationwide report on how common they are in deeper-tissue infections in the head and neck, the report's authors said. These include certain ear and sinus infections, and abscesses that can form in the tonsils and throat.

The study found a total of 21,009 pediatric head and neck infections caused by staph germs from 2001 through 2006. The percentage caused by hard-to-treat MRSA bacteria more than doubled during that time from almost 12 percent to 28 percent.

"In most parts of the United States, there's been an alarming rise," said Dr. Steven Sobol, a children's head and neck specialist at Emory University in Atlanta and an author of the report. The report appears in January's Archives of Otolaryngology, released Monday. It is based on nationally representative information from an electronic database that collects lab results from more than 300 hospitals nationwide.

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, can cause dangerous, life-threatening invasive infections, and doctors think that overuse use of antibiotics has contributed to its rise. The study didn't look at the severity of MRSA illness in affected children. Almost 60 percent of the MRSA infections found in the study were thought to have been contracted outside a hospital setting.

Dr. Robert Daum, a University of Chicago expert in community-acquired MRSA, said the study should serve as an alert to agencies that fund U.S. research "that this is a major public health problem." MRSA involvement in adult head and neck infections has been reported, although data on prevalence are scarce. MRSA infections were once limited mostly to hospitals, nursing homes and other health care settings. But other studies have shown they are increasingly picked up in the community, in otherwise healthy people. This can happen through direct skin-to-skin contact or contact with surfaces contaminated with germs from cuts and other open wounds.

But staph germs also normally live or "colonize" on the skin and in other tissues, including inside the nose and throat, without causing symptoms. And other studies have shown that for poorly understood reasons, the number of people who carry MRSA germs is also on the rise.

Sobol said MRSA head and neck infections most likely develop in MRSA carriers, who become susceptible because of ear, nose or throat infections caused by some other bug. Symptoms that it could be MRSA include ear infections that drain pus, or swollen neck lymph nodes caused by pus draining from a throat or nose abscess. Unlike cold and flu bugs, MRSA germs aren't airborne and don't spread through sneezing. MRSA does not respond to penicillin-based antibiotics, and doctors are concerned that it is becoming resistant to others. The report's authors said a worrisome 46 percent of MRSA infections studied were resistant to the antibiotic clindamycin, one of the nonpenicillin drugs doctors often rely on to treat community-acquired MRSA. However, other doctors said it's more likely that at least some of infections thought to be community-acquired had actually originated in a hospital or other health care setting, where MRSA resistance to clindamycin is common.

Dr. Buddy Creech, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn., said the research "fits nicely" with smaller studies reporting local increases in MRSA head and neck infections. "Every time someone looks, the rates of MRSA are going up, and that's certainly concerning because it's a bug that can cause dramatic disease," Creech said.

It's bad and getting worse, but we can make a difference!

A new category of bugs becomes more resistant to treatment, and their toll -- which already includes a Brazilian beauty queen -- is expected to rise.

By Mary Engel February 17, 2009

When Ruth Burns had surgery to relieve a pinched nerve in her back, the operation was supposed to be an "in-and-out thing," recalled her daughter, Kacia Warren

But Burns developed pneumonia and was put on a ventilator. Five days later, she was discharged -- only to be rushed by her daughter to the hospital hours later, disoriented and in alarming pain. Booster Shots: The Times health blogSeventeen days after the surgery, the 67-year-old nurse was dead. Burns had developed meningitis -- an infection of the fluid that surrounds the spinal cord and brain. The culprit was Acinetobacter baumannii, a bug that preys on the weak in hospitals. Worse, it was a multi-drug-resistant strain.

Acinetobacter doesn't garner as many headlines as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, the dangerous superbug better known as MRSA. But a January report by the Infectious Diseases Society of America warned that drug-resistant strains of Acinetobacter baumannii and two other microbes -- Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae -- could soon produce a toll to rival MRSA's.

The three bugs belong to a large category of bacteria called "gram-negative" that are especially hard to fight because they are wrapped in a double membrane and harbor enzymes that chew up many antibiotics. As dangerous as MRSA is, some antibiotics can still treat it, and more are in development, experts say. But the drugs once used to treat gram-negative bacteria are becoming ineffective, and finding effective new ones is especially challenging.

"We're literally running out of drugs to treat gram-negatives," said Dr. Brad Spellberg, an infectious disease specialist at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. "And there is nothing in the pipeline right now." Exact numbers are hard to come by, because infections by these three bacteria are not reportable by law. But using 2002 data voluntarily reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from about 300 large, mostly urban hospitals, the Infectious Diseases Society of America identified about 104,000 gram-negative infections that were resistant to at least some antibiotics, roughly the same as the 102,000 MRSA infections found that year.

A class of broad-spectrum antibiotics known as carbapenems have been the drug of last resort for gram-negative bugs. "The carbapenems are . . . the best gram-negative drugs we have," said Dr. Helen Boucher of Tufts University, an infectious disease specialist. "These bugs have found a way to make an enzyme that dissolves these drugs. That means our best gun is ineffective." As the drugs fail, doctors find themselves as a last resort turning to older, more toxic ones such as colistin, largely abandoned because of the severe side effects: kidney damage and deafness. At one East Coast hospital, the number of orders doctors made for colistin went from one in 2001 to 68 in 2007, Boucher said. "This is a drug that's like poison," she said.

For the most part, gram-negative bacteria are hospital scourges -- harmless to healthy people but ready to infect already-damaged tissue. The bacteria steal into the body via ventilator tubes, catheters, open wounds and burns, causing pneumonia, urinary tract infections, and bone, joint and bloodstream infections. Pseudomonas is widely found in soil and water, and rarely causes problems except in hospitals. Klebsiella causes a sudden, severe pneumonia, mostly in people already suffering from ailments such as diabetes or chronic lung disease. Its telltale sign is a blood-tinged sputum dubbed "currant jelly." It can also cause urinary tract and abdominal infections. Acinetobacter generally causes wound and bloodstream infections. It has become notorious among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are believed to have contracted it in field hospitals and carried it to veterans hospitals in the US

The first US outbreak of Klebsiella resistant to all known antibiotics occurred at a Brooklyn hospital in 2000. The so-called pan-resistant strain has since been found along the Eastern Seaboard and throughout the Midwest. A December report of Israeli hospitals found mortality rates from pan-resistant Klebsiella to be 44%. Doctors have no doubt that pan-resistant Klebsiella will show up in California and other states. California hospitals are already encountering strains that, although not resistant to all known antibiotics, are resistant to many. Harbor-UCLA had two cases of highly-drug-resistant Klebsiella last year, Spellberg said. Similarly resistant strains of Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter also are on the rise, as are resistant strains of Escherichia coli, another gram-negative bacterium. These four microbes are among the six leading causes of infections in hospitals, nursing homes and other healthcare settings, the Infectious Diseases Society of America reported.

The bacteria have remained largely off the public's radar, Boucher said, because they affect mostly the elderly or ill. But they do not always limit themselves that way. Drug-resistant Pseudomonas was behind the widely publicized Jan. 24 death of Brazilian beauty queen Mariana Bridi, 20, of sepsis -- a bloodstream infection. The health department in Espirito Santo, Brazil, said what began as a urinary tract infection spread rapidly. Bridi died after doctors had tried to contain the rampaging infection by amputating her feet and hands and removing her kidneys.

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