Wednesday - January 16, 2008
Vicious Disease Raises New Health Concerns For Gays
This is really some nasty shiz folks. One of the worst strains of MRSA, a variant known as USA300, has hit the urban gay zones all over the country. Gay men are 13 times more likely to catch it than the rest of the population. In San Francisco health officials think that more than 1 in 600 people in the city’s gayest neighborhood already have the disease. That’s on the edge of a for-real CDC epidemic.
It is suspected that the virus is sexually transmitted.
A strain called USA300 has been a leading cause of MRSA infection in this decade, and an exceptionally drug-resistant variant of it is now on the loose, researchers say.
The study estimated that 1 in 588 residents living within the Castro neighborhood 94114 ZIP code area is infected with that variant, which is resistant to six types of commonly used antibiotics. The risk of contracting this difficult-to-treat bug is 13 times greater for gay men than for the rest of the city’s population, researchers found.
“We probably had it here first, and now it is spreading elsewhere,” said Binh An Diep, a researcher at San Francisco General Hospital and lead author of the report. “This is a national problem, and San Francisco is at the epicenter.”
The germ typically causes boils and other skin and soft-tissue infections and, despite its resistance to some drugs, is still treatable by surgical drainage and several classes of antibiotics. What is unusual in this case is the high percentage of infections - up to 40 percent - occurring in the buttocks and genitalia.
Although researchers have stopped short of declaring this form of staph a sexually transmitted disease, the infections are found where skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activity.
Most of the infections are limited to the skin surface, but the bacteria can invade deeper tissues or disseminate through the bloodstream. According to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various forms of MRSA are causing 95,000 of these more costly and potentially life-threatening infections - and 19,000 deaths - annually in the United States.
Read about it at FoxNews
Read about at the NYT
Read about it at SF Gate
Read about it at Med Page
It has already been proven to be resistant to many antibiotics.
As if it wasn’t hard enough for these folks, now they’ve got this to deal with. Stay healthy people, and Wrap That Rascaltm, or else!!
Posted by Drew458
on 01/16/2008 at 11:55 AM
Filed Under: • Health-Medicine •
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