The MSM has a tendency to provide medical news coverage in one of three broad categories: Miracles ( New drug cures everything, prayer cured my brain cancer), Panic ( new disease unstoppable), and Disaster ( medical errors on the rise, wrong leg amputated), and rarely put even the bad news within any kind of rational framework.
This week we got treated to the Superbug story.
MRSA is not a new Superbug, anybody who works in the medical field is very familiar with it. Here is a relatively straight forward article that gives an overview in terms we can all grasp.
It makes two crucial points that help to de-mystify prevention of MRSA and indeed any kind of potentially life threatening infection.
Wash your hands. At my particular institution, we are super freaky about washing hands because the population we treat is often subject to immune suppression. We have had emergency family conferences when a family member has been witnessed failing to wash hands on multiple occasions. Ironically enough, when we did an in house study on staff compliance with hand washing, the RNs scored 100% and the MDs slightly less so, but still with excellent compliance. Naturally the MDs were pretty embarrassed when we told them and denied being the offenders. I have literally yelled at an MD from down the hall to wash his/her hands before entering a patient's room.
One other thing, don't go visit Aunt Jane or Uncle Joe at the hospital if you have some kind of viral/cold/flu infectious process either. Sick people should not visit sick people.
So, wash your hands. And you do not need to use anti-bacterial soap. As that article notes it is not any more effective that regular soap. One main reason is that the simple action of rigorously washing hands can help to ditch the nasty bugs and bacteria from the skin.
Another cause of the rise of MRSA? Using antibiotics inappropriately can lead to resistant infections. This does not mean I am about to rail against the evil and dark desires of big pharma. Do I like them, well, I have a certain grudging respect, because in my particular field we happen to use the products pitched by big pharma and they often work. Cancer has yet to be cured by celery seeds, meditation, or dancing gnomes. Now, if it turns out any of these do work against certain cancers I will be unemployed but also contented, because I bet dancing gnomes will work for a much cheaper pay rate and it might bring medical costs down. I do believe in the judicious use of antibiotic therapy. It can save a life.
Modern medical consumers have come to believe that if they go to the MD, they better damn well walk out with "something" for their trouble. MDs, in turn, are sometimes guilty, of either feeling the need to pacify a patient, or of not engaging in a thorough enough exam and using medications as a substitute. However, pediatricians are now often taking a watch and wait approach with childhood ear infections that do not appear to be severe. Up to 50 percent of antibiotics prescribed for pre-schoolers are for ear infections. There is now some thinking that the "watch and wait" approach is just as effective with respect to ear infections. It turns out that while symptoms may disappear more quickly with antibiotic use, one study noted that almost two thirds of children had a resolution of symptoms without antibiotics.
Whenever we report a change in clinical condition to an MD, the first question they ask after hearing a review of the scenario is how does the patient look? Now, I have had many instances in which a patient looked fine and turned out to be sick. Because of that, and some gut instinct, I always insist the MD make a quick exam. However, when people look sick, they often are. If a patient or a parent tells me the last time this happened, we ended up in the ICU, I simply call the MD and tell them an immediate exam is necessary. We are always told in the medical field, don't just look at the numbers/machines, look at the patient. Don't examine an event in an isolated manner, stop and think, stop and listen, take history in account.
The point of all this is not to give myself an ego boost and to trumpet my fantastical nursing skills, I am an average technician, I have good gut instinct. Preventing the introduction of any so called Superbug, does not require one to be a medical expert. It does demand a measure of common sense. Wash your hands, don't hang out with other sick people when you are sick, and you don't need antibiotics for you or your child for a nasty cold. I cannot diagnose, the is the realm of the physician. However, there are some common sense guidelines: if the illness persists, if you have a fever that is unusually high, or one that does not go away, it might be time for antibiotic therapy or some other type of medical intervention. Medicine is not a mystery novel and we are not all doomed to be mowed over by a Superbug.