Are your local hospitals suddenly infested with MRSA and staph?

I don’t think it is sudden or anything new. When my husband was hospitalized for six months in 1990 he acquired MRSA and has lived with it ever since. My niece was hospitalized with MRSA two years ago. It is frightening, but it is nothing new.

Yeah, this is fairly common.

They do test you if you get admitted but our tests here at least take a week or two to come back.

Universal standard precautions are in place to prevent the careless spread. However hospitals are full of sick people and accidents and carelessness occur. I heard the UK is now using copper fixtures because they have are more sanitary.

I’ve sort of got the impression hospitals almost unavoidably breed MRSA. They do such a thorough job disinfecting and antibotisizing it leaves a beautiful niche for the less vulnerable microbes to settle in. Once you clear out the vulnerable bugs the remaining ones suddenly have greater access to resources and less competition for them.

It’s almost the definition of selective breeding :/

Anyone scheduled for any kind of surgery at our local medical center must go in a prescribed number of days before and be tested for MRSA. If the test comes back positive, there is a rigorous course of washing and showering with a serious antibacterial soap. This has been in place since 2008 (and I see reviewed in 2010).

Definitely not something new. MRSA isn’t just in the hospitals, it’s out in the community as well.

You might be amazed by the number of people (friends and family members) that visit people in the hospital, but refuse to wear the proper isolation equipment (gowns, gloves, masks if necessary). I’ve seen parents bring little children (1–3 years old) into visit a patient with C Diff (or other resistant infections) and none of them will gown up and they’ll let the child crawl all around on the floor. We try and try to educate them and get them to understand that they are protecting themselves and the rest of the public, but they don’t care.

My grandmother used to say you get sick in the hospital. So true.

I don’t know if it is happening more, but I have always heard of bad infections being caught in the hospital from since I can remember. I am in my mid forties.

Sorry about your friend. Very sad. Did antibiotics bring on her C. dificile infection? Did she actually catch it while in the hospital for something unrelated?

@Seaofclouds That reminds of a study I read to the effect that the floors have the least percentage of germs…. Which seems odd because I immediately thought of all the bad aimers and shoes tracking that all over… But it was a significant percentage smaller and a related article suggested that disinfectants were unnecessary for floors.

I was skeptical but now hearing and thinking about children I certainly hope that it is a requirement to disinfect all floors.

I contracted MRSA a few years ago, and spent five days in isolation in the hospital on an IV antibiotic – Vancomycin. Now there is a strain of staph that is resistant to that antibiotic, also: VRSA.

A friend who is a nurse and works oncology at our local hospital recently had a C-section there, and contracted MRSA. Now she’s out of work and on heavy oral antibiotics for the second month. She would have been on maternity leave, anyway, but this isn’t how she expected it to be…

I don’t think it’s new or sudden, and I only expect it to become more prevalent.

Lots of hospitals are struggling to make ends meet. In the hospital my dad landed in before he died, they didn’t have enough cleaning staff. I remember he contracted C Dif there, and when he stood up to go to the bathroom, it just drained right out of him and all over the floor. I immediately called a nurse, but they were “not allowed to clean it up”. They put in an order for janitorial, but it took 2½ hours for them to get there. In the meantime, I was grabbing everything I could find and tossing it on the floor to mop it up while the nurses and aides walked through it.

It was disgusting. No wonder people get infections in the hospital. I avoid them at all costs. Nasty, filthy places.