Drug-Resistant Bacteria Building a badder bug

Recent reports about a "super bug" - a strain of bacterium that resists treatment by first-line antibiotics - seem ominous at first glance. MRSA ("methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus") is a virulent critter that has evolved a way to resist all but the most powerful antibiotics.

According to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released last week, almost 19,000 people in the United States died from MRSA infections in 2005 - more than the death total for HIV infection.

That's the headline, and it deserves attention. Concern is understandable, moreover, when reports arise of local children sent home, and schools closed, because of MRSA infection - as happened last week with a student at Chichester High School in Delaware County. Or the student who contracted MRSA at the Community College of Philadelphia. And in a worker's compensation claim, a guard at Graterford Prison alleges that she contracted MRSA there, and that 100 of the inmates have it.

But most of the 2005 fatalities were the outcome of invasive, internal infections, many of those in hospitals, whereas most MRSA is a skin disease that appears as boils and pustules. Like other such diseases, it is spread largely by person-to-person contact, and it usually can be treated with proper skin care and medication.

Chichester High was responsible in notifying everyone and in scrubbing its locker rooms. But according to the Mayo Clinic and other reputable sources, most of the time, schools don't have to close if such infections are found.

But MSRA does raise a larger question: How can we help fight the spread of microbial resistance to drugs?

Let's face it: Human beings are, in effect, helping create drug-resistant microorganisms. That's why drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia are more in the public eye. We invent antibiotics, overuse them, and the critters - many of which grow new generations within hours - evolve resistance.

It works by natural selection. Those that can't stand up to the antibiotics die, leaving those that can, which go and make copies of themselves ad infinitum. Many of the original antibiotics - penicillin, for example - are now much less useful than when first employed; some are all but useless. Staph aureus was the first bug to show resistance to penicillin - way back in 1947.