Last week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contains a troubling story of a medical student who inadvertently infected a quadriplegic Iraq war veteran with MRSA, an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that plagues hospitals. The photo you see above is the result of a simple petri dish test. The left panel (the placebo group) reveals the growth of MRSA after the student imprinted his unwashed hand and the dish was incubated (this allows the bacteria to grow to the point where bacterial colonies [the red granules you see in the pic] are visible). The panel on the right (the experimental group) shows that the dish lacked any MRSA growth when the student cleaned his hand with alcohol foam.
Although most MRSA infections occur in hospitals or other health care settings, other infectious diseases can be spread by poor hygiene:
Infectious diseases that are commonly spread through hand-to-hand contact include the common cold, flu and several gastrointestinal disorders, such as infectious diarrhea. Some people with the flu, particularly older adults and people with chronic medical problems, can develop pneumonia. The combination of the flu and pneumonia, in fact, is the eighth-leading cause of death among Americans. Inadequate hand hygiene also contributes to food-related illnesses, such as salmonella and E. coli infection. As many as 76 million Americans get a food-borne illness each year.
Posts
