MRSA in Schools

An emergency room doctor makes a connection between hygiene and rates of MRSA infection based on general observation.

Medical people have their own form of “gallows humor” and don’t sugar coat things they see, especially when talking among themselves.

His observation? He can “smell” MRSA, because it seems to occur much more often among those who are dirty.

This certainly makes sense. People with poor hygiene are likely to be lax in many other ways as well.

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions, and clean people are contracting MRSA.

But as a general observation, it is probably an accurate one.

How does this relate to schools? Well, kids from all types of families and social strata attend the same schools. We are also seeing a large number of recent arrivals from different parts of the world where Western hygiene isn’t practiced.

The best thing a parent can do is stay informed and involved with your kid’s health and environment.

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Ran across an excellent article about taking care of your feet and preventing MRSA infections.

Our feet do a lot of “dirty work” and get little reward. Yet they are at higher risk for infection that many other parts of our body.

According to the article:

Dr. Michael Nirenberg, known as America’s Podiatrist, has just published the booklet, “MRSA and Your Feet: 12 Ways to Protect Your Feet and Your Family’s Feet.”

So give those feet a break, and some TLC.

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In another attempt to straighten the confused information about how to best prevent the spread of staph in our schools, officials in northeast Arkansas point out that “This infection is spread by person-to-person contact in almost all cases. Therefore, closing schools for cleaning will have minimal impact and is not routinely recommended.”

They also reveal another fact about MRSA. It isn’t new. Dr. Phillips of the Arkansas Department of Public Health provides the following:

According to Phillips, despite the recent interest in MRSA, the condition is nothing new. “We have been working diligently over the last several years to provide education materials about MRSA…”

It’s good to see that these folks are looking beyond doing things just for appearance sake.

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In case you missed it, the CBS program 60 Minutes did a feature story on MRSA and its prevention in schools.

While it wasn’t a very in-depth program, it did point out two obvious flaws in the simplistic prevention methods being discussed all over the media.

The doctors interviewed on the program stated plainly that school disinfections and hand washing would not stop the spread of MRSA.

Certainly hand washing is a good practice, and they didn’t dispute that. But the simple fact that infections keep popping up in schools that are being cleaned repeatedly is clear evidence that cleaning isn’t enough.

On the down side, the program resorted to “prescribing” a new vaccine as the only solution.

That isn’t the solution. There is a lot of debate over vaccines, and they aren’t a cure all.

Even if they could develop an effective vaccine with no harmful effects, that wouldn’t do anything for the lesser known diseases that are starting to show up.

The link to the story is here:

60 Minutes on MRSA in Schools

While the comments are a bit messed up, you can find some intelligent responses that recognize the role of immune system health, and address antibiotics and hormones in our food supplies.

There are also some comments from nurses and people who contracted bad cases of MRSA.

There are no magic pills out there to solve this problem, but there are simple steps you can take to protect your children.

MRSA is just one of 12 new and emerging diseases that threaten our children’s health.

You can learn more about them at How to Protect Your Child from 12 Diseases Your Mother Never Told You About

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Another Consequence of Short-Sighted Solutions

In his discussion of hand washing protocols, Dr. Schwimmer brings up an interesting note about a couple of patients who become fearful of becoming social outcasts because they have MRSA.

Because our medical solutions are so often skin deep, it is easy to overlook the ramifications of such shallow thinking.

MRSA can cause heavy damage to people with weakened immune systems. It isn’t some boogey man that just happens to get you.

Until the media and responsible medical authorities can start making that connection, we are going to see more misinformation and hysteria.

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