Wednesday, April 30, 2008

At least it's not flesh eating bacteria... by gimleteye

Land speculators putting their rock mines and platted subdivisions into the last remaining open space in South Florida, put me in the mind of flesh eating bacteria. Lately I hadn't heard a lot about statistics for Methicillin Resistant Staph Infections (MRSA), so I dug in.

It appears there has been a rapid increase in MRSA infections, maybe it correlates to water quality, maybe the gruesome cases reported by the media are sending more people to go to the doctor and more doctors to send samples to sterile labs for testing.

In 2007, there were some 50,000 infections reported to Florida state-certified labs for testing, mostly skin and soft tissue wounds, of which fully half were MRSA. That seemed a lot to me.

I wondered if there were statistics on people being killed by MRSA. Apparently, Florida is wondering too. If you want to learn more, here is a report by the Florida Department of Health, published last July.

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