MRSA, Mersa, Staph, Staff Infection, Treatment & Symptoms

MRSA in Healthcare Settings

Link: MRSA in Healthcare Settings | CDC Infection Control in Healthcare.

MRSA has been featured in the news and on television programs a great deal recently. MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This type of bacteria causes “staph” infections that are resistant to treatment with usual antibiotics. MRSA occurs most frequently among patients who undergo invasive medical procedures or who have weakened immune systems and are being treated in hospitals and healthcare facilities such as nursing homes and dialysis centers. MRSA in healthcare settings commonly causes serious and potentially life threatening infections, such as bloodstream infections, surgical site infections, or pneumonia.

These are the stark facts from the leading agency on infectious disease. If MRSA is new to you the guide below will help you grasp the key issues and find out more about the infection that may be touching you or your family.

Staph aureus bacteria is carried by 1 in 3 people. Many people carry or are colonised by staph bacteria, have no symptoms and only suffer an infection when they have another illness, wound or graze. Read More

Antibiotics tamed staph but eventually multidrug resistant staph emerged (MRSA). Many come in contact with MRSA via hospital treatment and about 1% of the population now carry it. Read More

Community Acquired MRSA (CA MRSA)  is a different type of staph infection. It mainly causes skin infections and can be treated by more drugs. It does spread faster and can do more damage than the hospital strain to those it infects.  (MRSA, sometimes called mersa,mursa or msra, is not a virus. Viruses need to infect something to keep on living. Bacteria can exist on their own for months) Read more about CA MRSA

How is it treated? There are 3 key treatment methods that are commonly used. Read More

How do people catch MRSA? There are several ways it is believed to spread.Find out how you might have caught it

How can it be prevented The media often focus on clean hospitals and clean hands as a key to combating MRSA. Others believe that this will only cut cases by 30% and that a diverse strategy is vital. Discover more about about home and hospital hygiene.

Stay informed - this site and several others can help you do this. The A-Z guide in the right hand column will give you in depth information on over 50 aspects of MRSA from over 5000 articles, news items and academic papers.

Scroll down for further sources of MRSA information or use the list below to access information via the new version of this site.

Don't panic, but do be worried re MRSA

Link: Health | "Superbug" — what you need to know about MRSA | Seattle Times Newspaper.

Last month, a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that in 2005, some 94,000 people were infected by the most serious form of MRSA infections, and one in five died.

Understanding MRSA

Attack of the Superbugs: The Spread of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

Link: ABC News:

     Drug-resistant bacteria are spreading into our communities and infecting the wounds of unsuspecting people.  Over the course of a year, a surprisingly large number of MRSA infections, somewhere between 8 and 20 percent, was the result of community-acquired, out-of-hospital, infections.

Click the link above for a well written guide to MRSA

Q&A: MRSA

Link: SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Q&A: MRSA.

Superbugs - including MRSA and the virulent stomach bug clostridium difficile - cost the NHS £1bn a year and though most cases are reported in hospitals they can be caught anywhere. What are these infections, and what can be done to halt their spread? David Batty explains

Click the link above for the whole article - very helpful overview

MRSA is major heart infection factor

Link: Endocarditis infection

"The finding of S aureus as the leading cause of IE differs from previous reports and may be due in part to increasing rates of staphylococcal bacteremia related to health care contact in industrialized nations," the authors write. "S aureus is now the most common cause of IE in many areas of the developed world. Patients with IE due to S aureus exhibit distinct characteristics compared with patients with IE due to other pathogens.

MRSA - Here to stay?

REGENT Antiseptics
A fine, detailed overview of MRSA, Hygiene with insight into the different strains of MRSA and their epidemic nature. Highly recommended

Why is MRSA a concern?

Medical News Today What is MRSA? Why is MRSA a concern? How is MRSA treated? A helpful plain English guide

MRSA Information guide

About.com
A helpful directory of MRSA sites, directories etc

CDC | MRSA - Methicillin-Resistant S. Aureus

CDC | MRSA - Methicillin-Resistant S. Aureus
This is the official briefing from the key agency and contains links to several key sites and web pages

MRSA Introduction

MRSA - Here to stay?
This a helpful overview of the issues surrounding the medical nature of MRSA. It also highlights the emergence of VRSA - strains of the virus that are resitant to the vaccine vancomycin used to treat MRSA. This a thorough and useful introduction to the subject