Superbug - The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn McKenna

MRSA is methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This book is a warning. The author is sure that MRSA will keep developing resistance to antibiotics and that it could "be the most frightening epidemic since AIDS." For awhile there was MRSA one usually acquired while a patient in a hospital. And then there was also a community-acquired MRSA that seemed to come out of the blue, but was devastating to those who were afflicted. The hospital staph was more resistant to antibiotics, but the community staph often had more dire consequences and worse infections. The author tells of several horrific cases; some patients died and others had long debilitating treatments, usually after their infection was fulminant.

Now, these various staphylococci strains are converging and thus the alarm raised by this author. The staph bacterium cleverly and quickly mutates so that antibiotics quickly become ineffective. Perhaps a vaccine can be developed in time to prevent an epidemic, but that has not yet happened. What is interesting is that many of us are colonized with MRSA and can be carriers and infect more compromised patients..newborns, the elderly, immunocompromised patients, those recovering from or having surgery, etc. There are cases where healthy surgeons or nurses have infected several hospitalized patients.

The overuse of antibiotics must be addressed in our healthcare systems since often these are prescribed for a viral illness and have no effect whatsoever on the causative virus, but any bacteria in our bodies are then exposed to the antibiotic and continue to develop resistance. This book gets moderately technical but is readable by the interested lay person. We should all at least be aware that this is happening and not expect or take antibiotics every time we have a viral illness. We should practice good hygiene like hand-washing. We should be proactive with our healthcare providers if we have a skin or soft tissue infection that seems not to respond to prescribed antibiotics. There are still drugs to treat MRSA, but this author feels in the not too distant future, none of our current antibiotics will cure MRSA.