No quick MRSA fixes

We live in day when everything is instant or at least very high speed.

I was brought up when the quickest way of cooking vegetables was in the pressure cooker. Coffee was instant but not as nice as it is today, and SA (staph) was a problem then as it resisted Penicillin and was about to start resisting the new antibiotic methicillin.

We want our instant solutions and easy ways out. We forget that a war is never won quickly, or easily. Today there are too many of us in the community who carry the MRSA bacteria on us and colonize other people in our homes, offices, restaurants and gymnasium. We play sports and our team and opponents are also colonized. We must get back into the habit of frequently washing our hands. When we sweat we must shower and wash our used sportswear before we reuse it or someone else borrows it. It is not an instant fix we are finding.

Then someone comes up with an instant fix. A new antibiotic or anti-bacterial to fix this MRSA and rid people of it. It comes onto the pharmacist's shelves and within a year it disappears. WHY? MRSA is cunning and will fight to stop being killed at all costs. For MRSA there are no tests to see if its reaction will hurt the person infected. MRSA's motto is “Survive at any cost”. Within about a year the so-called miracle cure will probably be defeated.

This is giving the pharmaceutical companies a headache. They spend millions of dollars developing a new antibiotic to kill MRSA, and no-one will use it on large numbers of patients. You see as soon as the antibiotic is used on large numbers of patients there is a risk that MRSA will adapt to it and defeat it. So pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to produce new antibiotics as they are not cost-effective.

What does the future hold? It does not matter if we defeat MRSA or not the discipline of hand washing regularly and showering after activity will still be 100% necessary. The next bacteria will infect wounds and will fill the gap that the MRSA has left so get used to washing.

There are drugs being developed to prevent the MRSA virus causing infections, but they will take time to test and use, so be patient.