It has proved to be the defining image of the hospital in the UK over the last few years, wards shut down and hospital closed due to one infection or another that is rampaging through the wards. My father in law had to be air lifted back from Tenerife after a stroke and even as his plane was in the air the hospital were expressing doubts that they would be able to received him as 50% of their wards were closed due to the Norwalk virus. This virus gives rise to a diarrhoea and vomiting type illness, which can be serious in an already sick patient, but others like MRSA have claimed many lives.

One chilling statistic is that deaths from MRSA between 1993 and 2003 doubled to be slowed in 2004 by the Governments targets.

The ‘SA’ of MRSA stands for Staphylococcus aureus, which is part of a group of common bacteria. In fact it is often carried in our throats and will sometimes lead to a mild infection in an otherwise healthy person. The ‘MR’ of MRSA stands for methiciillin-resistant which is a catch all term applied to any strain of Staphylococcus aureus that proves resistant to one or more of the customarily relied on antibiotics. Antibiotics are not entirely unable to counter MRSA but the doses required to treat patients with this condition are usually a lot higher and need to be given for much longer to beat the infection and there are still some antibiotics to which MRSA has a slightly decreased resistance.

Bacteria have been around since time began. Bacteria genes are expert at surviving and are constantly mutating under antibiotic attack, so that eventually the strongest are able to resist the majority of known antibiotics. Whenever we are given antibiotics by our doctor the advice is always to finish the course. Many of us however, feeling much better, don’t do this allowing the strongest of the bacteria to survive and become more resistant. In hospitals where so many strains of bacteria and antibiotic treatments are present this strengthening and mutating of the most resistant strains accelerates. Add to this patients in close proximity to each other with medical professionals going from one to another, and you have the ideal conditions for infection to spread. In patients who are elderly or already weakened by illness this can be catastrophic.

The symptoms of MRSA are varied and depend largely on the part of the body that is attacked by infection but can be a tenderness with swelling and reddening of the site of infection through such things as burns, catheter sites and surgical incision wounds.

With the numbers of MRSA infections rising steadily year-by-year there is understandable concern about the future. There is a very real possibility that the day will come when a bug evolves that is completely resistant to every antibiotic. Vancomycin, generally considered the last chance drug in treating MRSA, has already met its match in a super bug that has mutated to become resistant to it leading to VRSA – vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus.