Mirror Displays MRSa Ignorance

Link: Mirror.co.uk

    Mmmmmm ....... Back to medical school for the Mirror boys. How do they think the bug gets into the upper respitory tract where most colonization takes place?

SCARES over nasty new diseases could prove a goldmine for the people behind a website called medical-masks.co.uk, run by Berkshire company The Ability Organisation. It is touting surgical face masks on the back of bird flu, the SARS virus and hospital "superbug" MRSA, charging �19.99 plus VAT for a box of 50. Just so you know, the main route of infection for MRSA is through the skin - so a mask will be useless.

Comments

[Ruth Wollacott]

Whilst I agree with the sentiment that to sell commercial facemasks to the public is a cynical attempt to print money, the idea of using facemasks is far from useless. The market for the facemasks should, however, properly be the NHS/government.

I am surprised that the Daily Mirror have made this comment as I was invited by the Mirror to take part in their General Election campaign last spring, to ask questions of each of the party leaders about MRSA. A trainee NHS nurse was also on the panel and all infection control measures to address MRSA were discussed with Mr. Blair, including the use by NHS staff of facemasks. These discussions were reported with photographs in the Mirror last April and there were two reports in the Observer in the summer regarding correspondence between myself and Mr. Blair when he assured me that combating MRSA was a pivotal aim of his new government and that all measures possible were being investigated.

MRSA can be colonised in the nose and throat of an otherwise healthy person, causing no symptoms and no illness. NHS workers agree that MRSA colonisation is transient and it follows that constant screening would be impractical. However, in the circumstances where a healthcare worker is inserting a catheter or canula, or dressing an open wound, transmission of MRSA into that break in the skin is quite possible. It is in these instances when wearing a facemask would offer a considerable amount of protection for the patient; the masks, however, do have to meet the clinical standard required - they are not ordinary household masks.

My son James was 19 when he contracted MRSA in hospital three years ago, following successful surgery to repair a sports injury to his knee. As a result of the illness and damage caused by MRSA, he is still not fit enough to return to work. There is no dispute that he contracted MRSA whilst in the care of the NHS but the route of transmission remains a mystery. One suggestion, made by Lord Warner on GMTV last year, was that he suspected James' infection to have been caused by the titanium pins used during the reconstruction not being sterile and this comment was reported in the New York Times and an Italian medical professional journal. However, an equally possible route may have been from the unwashed hands or colonised breath of any of the NHS staff who were dealing with his wounds or, indeed, from airborne particles or in the dust in the hospital.

For James, that is quite irrelevant - he nearly died, has been extremely ill, has already lost three years of his life, he has had several invasive surgeries to alleviate the damaged caused by by MRSA, he has been in constant pain and his mobility is severely impaired. His future is necessarily uncertain as his choice of employment is likely to be limited and his overriding ambition of returning to competitive sport is, maybe, somewhat optimistic.

Bear in mind that James was admitted to hospital with torn ligaments and a severed artery behind the knee sustained when playing in the garden; he was 19, very fit and healthy, worked in building maintenance and played competitive fast contact sport. He was not an old, immune suppressed, longstay patient with underlying medical problems but an athletic young man in the peak of physical health. Wearing a facemask may have ensured that he had remained so.

Infection control in NHS hospitals should be the basis of the entire system; without rigorous infection control the efforts of the surgical staff are negated. Management of NHS hospitals is a direct responsibility of elected government and despite Mr. Blair's assertion to me last summer that New Labour are on the job, I think the latest news demonstrates quite clearly that whilst some members of New Labour are well and truly on the job, it is not necessarily the job for which they were elected.