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Staph infections are a common bacterial skin infection, especially in athletes and among wrestlers. And even though MRSA is largely a problem in hospitals, that
by araneae 15y ago
Staph infections are a common bacterial skin infection, especially in athletes and among wrestlers. And even though MRSA is largely a problem in hospitals, that doesn't mean it's not a problem for all of us. Most people visit a hospital at some point. My cousin got a staph infection for going in to have a baby.
- burgerbrain 15y agoWell whatever the possible harm elevated staph levels in raw supermarket meat may cause, is it actually harm that we can statistically detect? Can we actually show this is causing any harm?
- mechanical_fish 15y agoWe certainly know that multidrug-resistent bacteria cause harm. Plenty of case studies there. I'm no biologist, so I don't know whether or not we can show, for any given strain of multidrug-resistent bacteria found in a sick patient, whether its ancestors most likely acquired its resistance genes while living in a farm animal, while living in an adult human who was taking antibiotics for some other condition, or someplace else. My guess is that such a demonstration might be possible -- cheap gene sequencing, plus extensive statistics, yields a lot of deductive power -- but I don't know if it has been done already or not, and maybe I'm wrong and it's going to be impossible to do conclusively. Bacterial genomes aren't always that big, and bacteria are quite promiscuous with genetic material, so their line of family descent gets fuzzy much faster than it does with multicellular creatures like ourselves. One thing is certain: There will be a lot more work attempting to answer these questions.