Transcript of
MRSA
I'm Professor Brian Duerden.
I'm the chief microbiologist at the Department of Health.
MRSA stands for methicillinn-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
It's an antibiotic-resistant variant of a very common organism
that causes the majority of wound infections
and boils and pimples in patients.
It's become a problem in hospitals
because the antibiotic resistance has been selected out
and these particular strains colonise patients in hospital
and cause infections when they're vulnerable
and have other things wrong with them.
Staphylococcus aureus, the sensitive or not-so-resistant version, is common.
At least a third of us carry that in our noses or our skins quite healthily.
About ten per cent of those people in the general population,
it's MRSA, the methicillinn-resistant ones,
so that's about three per cent of the overall population.
It causes a variety of infections.
In hospital it particularly gets into surgical wounds after operations
and is the commonest cause of wound infections.
It can also get into the blood stream when patients have intravenous lines,
or it can get into the lungs of patients
when they're in intensive care being ventilated.
There's been concern as to how much this is related
to hospital cleanliness or the lack of it.
Obviously everybody wants a hospital to be clean.
It should be clean and it must be clean.
But there's not a direct relationship
between that and the cause of these infections
because it's not the general environment
that seems to lead to people getting MRSA,
it's more the person-to-person contact that's important.
So when doctors are putting intravenous drips up, or urinary catheters,
or nurses are dealing with those things or doing other elements of care,
they must wash their hands,
they must do the procedures with what we call aseptic practice,
not touching anything, making sure everything's sterile,
and that helps keep these bacteria at bay.
When somebody has an MRSA infection,
clearly everybody must take appropriate care
when they're visiting them or touching them,
but that does not mean they have to be put into total isolation,
can't have visitors, can't be seen by anybody or touched by anybody.
Clearly we would not advise people who were ill themselves
or were particularly vulnerable to infection to visit an infected patient.
The public have a role to play in this.
They have a particular role in hospitals, when they visit relatives,
by putting gowns on if their relative's infected,
by always washing their hands when they go into a hospital
and when they're leaving,
when they're going in and out of the ward,
when they've touched their relative or the surroundings.
All of those times, wash their hands
or use the alcohol gels that are provided.
Both are equally effective against MRSA.
