Maryn McKenna

Journalist and Author

MRSA at the beach

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Am I the only person whose grandmother said it was healthy to swim in the sea because the salt would disinfect any cuts or skin nastinesses? Well, apparently my grandmother — and who knows, maybe yours too — was wrong:

The annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science concluded today in Chicago. Among the presentations: Physicians at the University of Miami tested seawater at popular Florida beaches and found that swimmers have a 37% chance of coming into contact with drug-sensitive staph, and 3% chance of encountering MRSA. The organisms are deposited into the water by infected or colonized humans.

Dr. Lisa Pisano said in a precis distributed to press for the meeting (I don’t think I am able to link to this, but am checking):

Our hypothesis is that the bathers using recreational waters not only contribute to the organisms in the water, and therefore serve as a source of staph, but they might also become colonized or infected by the organisms that they are exposed to while in the water or on the beaches. Investigators from our team had previously shown that staph was shed by adults into marine water filled pools after short exposures, supporting that people could serve as a source for the bacteria. In the studies I will present, we confirm that adults who are known to be colonized indeed shed their own bacteria into marine waters. We also show that children, in diapers, both known and some not known to be colonized with staph also shed bacterial into marine waters.
…
37% of the water samples contained staph and 3% of these were MRSA. Genetic analyses of the isolated organisms revealed that the majority of the staph, not MRSA, appeared to be non-aggressive strains lacking the key virulence factors known to be associated with more aggressive strains of bacteria. However the majority of the isolated MRSA were those likely to of the more aggressive variety.

To prevent colonization, or infection of any abrasions or open wounds, the researchers recommend showering before entering the water and before leaving the beach.

Until I figure out what of the materials can be linked to, or whether press releases were put online by funders of the research, here’s a Reuters story carried by ScientificAmerican.com.

Terribly sad story from Florida

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Cody Shrout, a 12-year-old 6th-grader who lived in Daytona Beach, Fla., was found dead in bed a week ago today by his 8-year-old sister.

His death was initially put down to chickenpox, which was circulating in his school, but the Volusia County medical examiner determined Tuesday that his death was due to MRSA.

Two weeks ago, he scraped his knee skateboarding, subsequently spiked a 103+ degree fever, was treated at a local ER and sent home. The story describing his treatment quotes his grandfather in a way that suggests the scrape was treated as a sports injury, with ice and ibuprofen.

Cody lived with his mother, sister, 3-year-old brother and grandfather. His mother, who is single, could not afford a funeral. With extraordinary generosity, Heather and Jason Jenkins, who own a plumbing business in Apopka, Fla., have paid for the funeral. He will be buried Tuesday.

An odd tidbit in this very sad story: Ten months ago, according to the Daytona Beach News-Journal, he was treated at that same medical center for a staph infection. The story doesn’t say whether he was an admitted patient or seen in the ER, and also doesn’t say whether it was MRSA or drug-susceptible staph. Interesting, though.

MRSA and jails and public reaction

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I have a GoogleNews Alert set to crawl for any new posts that mention MRSA. The Google crawler goes pretty deep and often finds things that I would not have known to look for; this week, it has produced a letter to the editor about conditions in a women’s jail in South Florida.

The letter itself is interesting, but the public reaction to it, in the form of comments on the website where it was reproduced, is breathtaking.

Here’s a quick recap: A woman named Susan M. Woods writes in the letters to the editor on TCPalm.com (which appears, after some drilling, to be a joint site for the Stuart, Fla. Treasure Coast News/Press-Tribune, the Vero Beach Press Journal, the Jupiter Courier, and the Sebastian Sun) about conditions at the Indian River County Jail, where she has been an inmate:

The absolute squalor women are forced to live in is similar to a Third World country. Backed-up toilets, black mold, roaches all around, and nothing to clean the common areas except diluted Windex — it’s frightening. It should be no surprise to hear that at least seven women have gotten MRSA — a staph infection — in as many months.

It will not surprise any of you who follow news about MRSA that jails and prisons are particularly vulnerable to outbreaks; the Los Angeles County Jail epidemic (first described in this MMWR article and further described in this one and covered in this book, which was written by, umm, me) has been going on for half a decade at this point and has affected thousands of prisoners. That there is an outbreak in a jail in Florida is exasperating and sad.

But that people in Indian River County think prisoners somehow deserve staph is just astounding. In the comments on Woods’ letter, they say:

In my opinion, someone with Susan’s alleged criminal record deserves far worse conditions in her cell than what she is describing in her letters.

You are supposed to not want to be there you idiot. That’s why its like living in a third world county.

The conditions in jail are horrendous but people keep coming back. What should the taxpayers do then? Take money away from roads, schools, emergency services to make sure the jails are clean, bright and cheery? Or hope that the bad conditions convince just one moron to obey the law.

If I understand the trolls commenters correctly, they believe that prisoners forgo human rights to such an extent that it is an appropriate part of their punishment to subject them to infectious diseases. So, OK: If they are unmoved to care for their fellow humans, we will leave them to their karma.

But really: Don’t they want to take care of themselves? It is well-established by now that MRSA in jails does not stay in jails: It moves out into the community when inmates who acquire it in jail are released and return to the outside. So unless you’re going to argue that people in jail should remain there indefinitely — which seems impractical given the rate at which we put people away — to be concerned about MRSA in jails is self-protection if nothing else.