Students at Pike Central High School in Pikeville, Kentucky staged a sit in in an effective effort to get their school to clean up after after a Pike County student was diagnosed with CA MRSA. Principal David Rowe threatened to suspend the students for three days causing all but 33 of them to abandon the sit in. The 33 students were given a choice of one day in-school suspension or two days of out of school suspension but now, two weeks later, all 23 of the area’s schools were shut down to disinfect them.
This is the kind of noise that people everywhere need to be making to draw as much attention as possible to this fast spreading epidemic. We need to fight for more information and protection from this bacterium disfiguring and killing people all over the world. I know I tried to get the local media’s attention drawn to CA MRSA for over year before I heard CA MRSA even mentioned on the local news. I’ve held my own sit in at my PC, writing to anyone who I thought might listen, ever since my daughter was misdiagnosed with spider bites at Creighton Medical Center in August of 2006. It was three months later before she was correctly diagnosed at Mercy Hospital in nearby Council Bluffs, Iowa, where an alarming number of needle sharing drug users were already diagnosed with this flesh eating disease.
I don’t know how unclean these 23 schools were, or if their efforts will halt the disease in their schools, but I do know that anything that brings more awareness of CA MRSA to the world is for the good of all of us.
Proper handwashing has to be mentioned in every news item, including the instructions for what proper handwashing is, i.e. washing hands and wrists with warm soapy water for the length of time it takes you to sing Happy Birthday. This is a major defense for each of us to take responsibility for to prevent the spread of this CA MRSA epidemic.