点击显示 收起
Aug. 31, 2006 - It may already be too late to bring the rapidly spreading drug-resistant staph bug known as MRSA under control.
That's the gloomy warning from a review article and editorial -- both by leading infectious disease experts -- in the Sept. 2 issue of The Lancet.
MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The bacteria are resistant to several important antibiotics. At least for now, some other antibiotic drugs still kill it.
But MRSA already is the most common skin infection in U.S. cities. Worldwide, anywhere from 2 million to 53 million people are carriers.
Staph in general, and MRSA strains in particular, are very tricky bacteria. It's easy for them to gain drug resistance. Staph bugs often infect the skin, but can infect other areas of the body as well.
The bug was first seen in hospitals. But new MRSA strains have arisen in the general community and, while on the loose, have become more easily transmissible -- and, in some places, more virulent.
Now these strains are going into hospitals, where they wreak havoc on vulnerable people -- and even on health care workers.
"The MRSA situation in hospitals, which still remains out of control in many countries, could potentially become explosive," warn Hajo Grundmann, MD, of the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, and colleagues, in The Lancet article.
An editorial accompanying the Grundmann article offers little solace.
""If we are going to act, we should do it now, before what is currently sporadic illness ... becomes epidemic, and commonly used antibiotics become useless," urges microbiologist Ian M. Gould, PhD, of Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, U.K.