Researchers at Cork Institute of Technology have revealed that they have discovered that a flower known as inula helenium kills MRSA bacteria.
Inula Helenium is a tall plant that grows wild in Cork and it blossoms in late summer. CIT also researched another plant, pulsatilla vulgaris, which also proved to be effective in killing MRSA. Extracts from both plants were tested on a group of 300 staphylococci and the inula helenium was 100% effective at killing the superbug.
The odd thing here is that I haven’t read yet about the world sitting up and noticing this. I just think we won’t hear a lot about potential cures that don’t enrich the pharmaceutical companies. Plants, silver, Phage Therapy, and other effective treatments seem to never make mainstream news. But I though the news belonged in my site.

Michael Otto and his colleagues at the federal Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton have shown that KRSA secretes a protein that pokes holes in one of the body’s main disease killing cells, destroying them. Also, individual MRSA bacteria know when their fellow super bugs are present in enough numbers to deliver maximum damage to the body’s immune cells and all strike at once thus winning the war. This is what gives CA MRSA its reputation for being flesh eating. The bacteria doesn’t even start making the PSM proteins that attack until it knows there are enough members of the CA MRSA army to win the war. This tells us that our super bug is what it is because it is super smart. Staph infections were the first to become immune to penicillin in the 1950’s, and then they were the first to become immune to the second generation antibiotic, methicillin.
Maybe a few of those saying we shouldn’t be overly afraid should look at this breaking news closely.
It is down right terrifying.

It is a sad thing to have won the war to enlighten this country about CA MRSA. Not that I won the war, the spread of the disease did that, but I was firing my gun anyway. This site has become redundant with all the news every day about MRSA now. Sadly, most of it is about school children coming down with it and schools closing across the country. I am going to devote myself more to Phage Therapy study and awareness now and let the news people who ignored me for over a year carry on now that it is the popular thing to do. Everything I know about MRSA is already in this site somewhere if anyone wants to read it. I’m out of here. God bless.

I have been reading about schools closing to disinfect and am wondering if this is the best way to spend money to combat MRSA. The bacterium are everywhere and easily carried by people and pets. All it takes to spread MRSA is for a positive person to touch their nose and then touch any surface and then someone else touch that spot and the infected person might not be and never et sick themselves with the disease. It seems money and time would be better spent to take more time to teach children to properly wash their hands, which is to wash them in warm soapy water for the length of time it takes to sing Happy Birthday, and also to install disinfecting lotion dispensers in the halls. I wrote an article earlier about a teacher’s aid who told me the school she teaches at rushes the kindergarteners through bathroom breaks often neglecting proper hand washing to save time. Changes in policies like these would be more effective and less intrusive and expensive than closing schools for ineffective sterilization, which seems rather like sensationalism.

They are installing antibacterial foam dispensers in Chicago’s Portage Schools in the hallways for students and staff to use. This is one of the best things I have read since all of the articles lately seem to advocate handwashing but none so far have mentioned exactly what thorough handwashing is. Again, wash hands and wrists with warm water and soap and wash for the length of time it takes to sing Twinkle Twinkle!

I am so tired of the messages from “doctors” and “professionals” to the public to “not panic” when I feel like I have been screaming at the top of my lungs for over a year to get attention drawn to CA MRSA. No, I don’t want people diving off of tall buildings in a panic but no one is doing that and still people are being told not to “panic” because they are just becoming concerned. I have even read one article quoting a doctor saying that CA MRSA should not even be referred to as a “Super Bug”! It a flesh eating bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics isn’t a Super Bug then what the hell is???? CA MRSA is affecting the whole world right now and the numbers are growing daily and the bacterium is constantly evolving and we are being told to “chill out” and not be afraid.
Be afraid. Be very afraid. Yes, handwashing is the key to prevention. But isn’t anyone besides me more afraid hearing this is our best defense instead of calmed?
We aren’t running down the street naked yet over CA MRSA but I believe we will only be a more confused nation about it if we don’t start calling a spade a spade.
This is a dangerous Super Bug, Folks, and it can attack anyone anywhere at any time. Wash your hands, check your sores, be careful in gyms, etc, and don’t turn your back or let down your guard. This will get worse before it gets better.
I’m out of here for now. See ya.

November 2nd, 2007

Investor’s Business Daily

THE RIGHT TO BARE ARMS
Betsy McCaughey

The top domestic issue in British politics is clean hospitals. When Gordon Brown addressed the Labour Party last month, he promised the cheering crowd that all hospitals would be “deep cleaned” to rid them of superbugs such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), which are killing an estimated eight thousand hospital patients yearly. He also ordered doctors in the British National Health Service to replace their long sleeved lab coats with freshly laundered short sleeved or sleeveless scrubs to curb the spread of germs from patient to patient.

Why aren’t politicians in the U.S. pledging to clean up hospitals? New data in the October 17th issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association show that MRSA infections are killing about twice as many people in the U.S. as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention previously estimated. The new MRSA data are based on actual laboratory results rather than on what hospitals tell the CDC, admit to families, or report on death certificates.

If the same methodology were applied to quantify deaths from all hospital infections (not just MRSA), the U.S. death toll would be substantially larger than the current CDC estimate of 100,000 a year. How much larger is still unclear, but how many must die to get the attention of U.S. politicians?

These deadly infections are largely caused by unclean hands, inadequately cleaned equipment, contaminated clothing and surfaces in hospitals. Boston University researchers surveying 49 operating rooms at four New England hospitals found that over half the surfaces that were supposed to be disinfected were overlooked by cleaners. A follow up study of 959 patient rooms in hospitals in Washington D.C., Connecticut and Massachusetts concluded that 52% of surfaces that were supposed to be cleaned before a new patient is admitted were left unclean. Why are hospitals so dirty? Because they are allowed to be. In most cities, restaurants are inspected once a year for cleanliness, but not hospitals, not even operating rooms.

At an academic hospital in Galveston, Texas a burn patient became infected with a drug-resistant superbug, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, (VRE) and molecular typing linked the infection to an unclean EKG wire where the germ had lingered for 38 days.

Superbugs can live for ninety days on labcoats and uniforms, repeatedly contaminating the hands of staff wearing them and carrying germs from patient to patient. A new University of Maryland study reveals that 65% of doctors and other medical professionals admit they change their lab coat less than once a week, though they know it’s contaminated. Fifteen percent say they put on a clean one less than once a month.

Hygiene is critical to prevent the spread of today’s superbug threats, such as MRSA and VRE, but it will also be vital to stop the next germ threat, Clostridium difficile or “C. diff.” Researchers at the national meeting of the Infectious Disease Society of America last month warned that C. Diff is the “new epidemic,” It killed more people in England last year than MRSA, and the same, especially virulent strain has already invaded some American hospitals.

C. diff causes watery diarrhea, and is usually spread by oral-fecal contamination, meaning traces of one patient’s feces enter another patient’s mouth. Poor hygiene is obviously the cause. At a teaching hospital in Philadelphia, three patients who consecutively occupied the same room came down with C.Diff. One died. A Journal of Hospital Infection study showed that one third of blood pressure cuffs rolled from room to room were contaminated with C. diff. When C. diff infections quadrupled at the University of Pittsburgh-Presbyterian Medical Center in 2000, researchers found that rigorous cleaning with bleach helped curb the outbreak.

Can hospitals afford to clean up? They can’t afford not to. Infections erode their profits. When a patient contracts an infection and spends weeks extra in the hospital, the hospital is not reimbursed for most of that care (nor should it be). Hospital infections are adding $30.5 billion a year to the cost of hospital care. That figure is almost as large as the entire budget for Medicare’s Part D drug benefit.

Gordon Browne insists that even the cash-strapped British National Health Service can afford a major cleaning effort. When a hospital in Dorchester England nearly doubled cleaning staff hours on one ward, MRSA transmission dropped 90% during the next six months and not one patient developed an MRSA infection. Savings from preventing infections amounted to three and one half times the added cleaning costs.

Politicians in the U.S. should take a page from Gordon Brown’s clean hospital initiative. Instead, the presidential candidates are focused on one health issue: the number of uninsured. The Institute of Medicine estimates that 18,000 people die prematurely each year because they lack health coverage and consequently get too little medical care or get it too late. That’s tragic. But more than five times that many people are killed by hospital infections each year and most of them have insurance. What plans do the presidential candidates have to clean up this deadly problem?

Betsy McCaughey is the Chairman and Founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former Lieutenant Governor of New York State.

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.

I am happy to see that the word MRSA is becoming well known in this country, including in my own area, although I am sad that I was correct that it would be necessary for everyone to know this four letter word. Now I’d like everyone to become familiar with another couple of words, Phage Therapy. I’ve written about it several times in here and the more I read the more I believe this is the answer to our bacteria war. Viruses are one of our biggest enemies. Why not use them to kill our other enemy?? It has been proven many times to work but the pharmaceutical companies would rather sell us high dollar antibiotics that only keep compounding the problem.
So lets all start boning up on Phage Therapy and hop on that bandwagon!

I recently shared information about CA MRSA with a friend I met Online who lives here, in Omaha, Nebraska. She told me that she was concerned that the kindergarteners that she works with aren’t encouraged to even wash their hands after using the restroom. She suggested working on handwashing and was shot down on the idea because it would “add another five to ten minutes” to the process of taking the class to the restroom. I do believe there are things best taught at home but believe this issue should be addressed in the home as well as in school. Especially in school! I wonder what that teacher would say about really proper handwashing i.e. singing Twinkle Twinklw while they wash their little hands??
We certainly don’t live in a MRSA free area. Besides the fact that I don’t think any such place exists any more, wee just hd four students diagnosed with a “staph” infection announced on the news this morning. And that is all it was announced as. They never once in the broadcast mentioned the word or letters MRSA and seemed to be downplaying it as much as they possibly could even though these four cases are typically on a football team together.
Awareness. I don’t know when it will come. I just saw a blog where a young man was claiming that MRSA was just the “scare of the moment”. It is time to wake up. This is not a bird flu coming here someday. It is here and all of the downplaying and fear of causing a panic are way too late. CA MRSA is an epidemic in this country and everyone has the right to know that and everyone at all ages should be being taught how to prevent and fight this Super Bug before we’re nothing more than a Robin Cook novel at its most horrific.