MRSA: The not-so-famous superbug – Harvard Health

Last year Daniel Fells, a tight end for the New York Giants, was hospitalized with a bad infection in his foot known as MRSA, which stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It is a drug-resistant form of staph. The infection didn’t respond to antibiotics, and at one point there was talk of needing to amputate the affected foot. After multiple surgeries, doctors were finally able to clear out the infection, but it is unlikely Fells will ever play football again.

Although it rarely gets headlines, MRSA is perhaps the most well-known superbug –– a type of bacteria that is resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics. These infections may have once seemed like an exotic problem, but with each football season they are becoming more common, affecting high school, college, and professional athletes indiscriminately. But the problem isn’t limited to athletes, as these bacteria also infect healthy people in the general community.

MRSA proves to be especially adept at evading the grasp of antibiotics, becoming a truly dangerous superbug. But this shouldn’t be a huge surprise, because as long as we’ve had antibiotics, staph bacteria have been figuring out ways to become resistant to them.

What exactly is MRSA… and why is it so dangerous?

According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Staphylococcus aureus, or staph, causes skin infections. These can include boils, impetigo, skin abscesses, and other painful conditions. If the infection goes unchecked, staph bacteria can cause pneumonia, blood poisoning, toxic shock syndrome, and sepsis (a life threatening immune response to an infection).

Penicillin was successfully used to treat these staph infections after the antibiotic’s discovery in 1940, but its effectiveness began to wane as the S. aureus bacteria began to develop a resistance to the drug. So, scientists turned to the drug methicillin, but by 1961 they discovered that the first strains of S. aureus were beginning to show resistance to this antibiotic as well. Over time, MRSA has become resistant to numerous antibiotics, making it increasingly dangerous and difficult to treat.

Who can get MRSA?

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in three people carry the staph bacteria in their nose, and two out of 100 people carry MRSA. There are more than 80,000 cases of MRSA each year, and more than 11,000 people die from these infections. Although most of these cases occur in the hospital setting, MRSA infection is becoming a more widespread problem in the general community.

“I actually think of [MRSA] as a pathogen that I have a tremendous amount of respect for, in the sense that it’s one of the very few bacteria that is very good at causing infections in healthy people and also very good at causing infections in sick people in the hospital,” says Dr. John Ross, an infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “There aren’t a lot of bacteria that do that.”

Although MRSA infection used to be primarily a “hospital problem,” it’s clear that MRSA is becoming a problem in the general population, usually in the form of skin infections. People can become infected with MRSA after being in contact with an infected wound, or by sharing personal items like razors, toothbrushes, or towels that have touched infected skin. The chances of getting MRSA increase in situations that have what doctors call the five Cs: crowding, skin to skin contact, compromised skin from cuts or abrasions, lack of cleanliness, and contaminated items and surfaces. Examples of people commonly in these situations include athletes, military personnel who live in close quarters, and daycare and school children, as they all involve crowding, skin-to-skin contact, and the sharing of equipment, supplies, and toys.

How you can lower your chances of getting MRSA

It’s important to recognize the signs of an infection early on. According to the CDC, MRSA skin infections can occur anywhere on the body, and they usually appear as a red bump or an area that is red, swollen, painful to the touch, abnormally warm, or full of pus. If you develop any of these symptoms, it’s important to call your doctor right away.

According to the CDC, maintaining good health and basic hygiene can help decrease the risk of bacterial infection. Promptly cleaning and bandaging any cuts or wounds until they are healed also helps keep cuts from becoming infected. Since MRSA can spread through personal items, it’s important not to share things like razors or towels, especially if people have cuts or scrapes.

“Basic general hygiene and hand washing are important,” says Ross. “If there is someone in your house with a staph or MRSA infection that can be spread to other people in the household it’s important that they be treated.”

Study unravels antibiotic resistance in MRSA ‘superbug’ infections

FINDINGS

Researchers applied a new approach pioneered at UCLA to predict which methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infections will fail to respond to antibiotic treatment. By focusing on epigenetics — changes to gene expression that can’t be detected by standard DNA sequencing — the study examined how the immune system recognizes dangerous superbugs and works with antibiotics to clear them.

BACKGROUND

The Staphylococcus aureus bacterium can live harmlessly on a person’s skin and in their nose, occasionally causing mild infections that can be treated with standard antibiotics. When it enters the bloodstream, however, it can transform into a virulent and life-threatening pathogen that doesn’t respond to most antibiotic treatments.

One of the most feared superbugs, MRSA can spiral into sepsis and destroy tissues and organs, requiring the amputation of limbs. If unresponsive to treatment, such infections can end in death. Prolonged attempts to treat the infection with increasingly toxic antibiotics can also increase resistance risk and lead to kidney damage, hearing loss or worse.

METHOD

The team used an approach developed at UCLA to study how methylation — a natural process in which the body modifies the activity of DNA without changing its sequence — can regulate the expression of some genes. These genes influence how the immune system protects against infection or partners with antibiotic therapy to clear stubborn infections.

IMPACT

The team identified 276 DNA sites in patients where methylation differed between those MRSA infections that were quickly resolved through the use vancomycin — one antibiotic that frequently is successful in combatting MRSA — and those infections that failed the antibiotic therapy.

Pinpointing these epigenetic signatures at early diagnosis will enable physicians to predict which patients are likely to respond to a frontline antibiotic treatment for MRSA and which require different treatment strategies to clear the infection. This personalized approach also holds promise for improving outcomes for viral infections like COVID-19, HIV and influenza, as well as bacterial infections like tuberculosis, urinary-tract infections and pneumonia.

AUTHORS

Authors of the study are Elaine Reed, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Diagnostic Medicine and a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Michael Yeaman, professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine and director of the Institute for Infection and Immunity at the Lundquist Institute at Harbor–UCLA Medical Center.

JOURNAL

The findings were published March 1 in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

FUNDING

Grants from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded the study.

Australian scientists have proposed a new drug to fight MDR-TB

A team of researchers from the University of Melbourne has found a way to defeat dangerous “superbugs” – multidrug-resistant pathogens, including MDR-TB – using teixobactin. According to experts, their discovery can also help in the fight against complications of acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).

A number of bacteria, as they develop, develop strategies that can undermine the action of antibiotics, turning pathogens into so-called “superbugs”. The latter successfully resist most available treatments and cause potentially fatal diseases.

Melbourne researchers have shown that the natural antibiotic teixobactin, recently discovered by their American colleagues, may be effective in treating bacterial lung infections such as tuberculosis and those commonly associated with COVID-19.

Their work could pave the way for a new generation of treatments for particularly dangerous ‘superbugs’, writes Science Daily.

Teixobactin was discovered in 2015 by a team led by Professor Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston (USA).

A new study from the University of Melbourne, published in May in the journal mSystems, is the first to provide an explanation of how teixobactin works against the “superbug” Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA.

MRSA is among the bacteria responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans, particularly secondary post-viral bacterial infections such as COVID-19 infections and influenza.

University of Melbourne Antibacterial Scientist Dr. Maitham Hussain and Dr. Tony Welkow synthesized the teixobactin moiety to produce a compound that showed superior efficacy against MRSA resistant to the antibiotic methicillin.

Dr. Hussain stated that previously there was no way to stop the development of MSRA bacteria because the latter were resistant to antibiotics.

“The rise in multidrug-resistant bacteria has become inevitable,” explained Dr. Hussain. “These bacteria cause many deadly infections, especially in immunocompromised patients, including diabetes and cancer, or even older people with secondary bacterial infections after the flu.”

A team from the University of Melbourne was the first to discover that teixobactin significantly inhibits the mechanisms involved in the formation of resistance to vancomycin-based antibiotics, which is used to treat complex skin infections, endocarditis, bone and joint infections, and meningitis caused by MRSA.

The development could lead to new treatments for lung infection, which Dr Velkov says will greatly facilitate preclinical development of teixobactin.

“Bacteria often develop resistance to antibiotics within the first 48 hours after injection,” commented Dr. Velkov. “However, the bacteria were not able to develop resistance to this compound in the time indicated.”

“Our results, – the expert is sure, – will open the door for the development of new antibacterial drugs for the treatment of gram-positive infections with multidrug resistance.”

mrsa superbug infections are lower than ever

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MRSA abbr.
med.	methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ( Alex_Odeychuk )
abbr.	MRSA
English Thesaurus
MRSA abbr.
abbr.	Mandatory Radar Service Areas
abbr., aviation	mandatory radar service area; material review segregation area
abbr., military	Materiel Readiness Support Activity; Materiel Readiness Support Agency
abbr., dialysis.	Methicillin Resistant Staph Auretes
abbr., space	microwave radiometer/scatterometer and altimeter
abbr., med.	Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus; methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus
abbr., microbiol.	methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus ( MichaelBurov )
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