Is Staph the New AIDS?

By Pamela Mortimer

Staph infection has been in the news a lot lately. Once confined to hospitals, more or less, the infection seems to have spread more readily throughout the public since the 1990s. On Monday, a report was released stating that a new variety of staph bacteria which is highly resistant to antibiotics seems to be spreading rapidly through the Castro district in San Francisco, a well known gay area. One theory is that this new form of staph may be spread through sexual contact. People in Boston, New York and LA also seemed to be adversely affected.

The bacteria are a form of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. The bacteria no longer chooses hospitalized patients but has been circulating outside medical institutions, infecting anyone from elementary school students to injection-drug users. Researchers stated that a strain called USA300 has been a leading cause of MRSA infection in recent years, and this exceptionally drug-resistant version of it is now on the loose.

The study was released online by the popular journal Annals of Internal Medicine. According to the report, the highest concentrations of infection by the drug-resistant bug are located in and around San Francisco's Castro district. Also affected are patients who visit health clinics that treat HIV infections in gay men throughout San Francisco and Boston.

The study estimated that 1 in 588 residents living within the Castro neighborhood is infected with the bacteria, which has proven to be resistant to six types of commonly used antibiotics. The risk of contracting this stubborn bug is 13 times greater for gay men than for the rest of the population.

"We probably had it here first, and now it is spreading elsewhere," said Binh An Diep, a researcher at San Francisco General Hospital and main author of the report. "This is a national problem, and San Francisco is at the epicenter."

Researchers have not declared this form of staph as sexually transmitted disease; however the infections are most often found where skin-to-skin contact occurs during sex.

Signs of infection include boils and other skin and soft-tissue infections. Despite its resistance to some antibiotics, the infection is still treatable by surgical drainage and several classes of antibiotics. The most unusual factor in many cases – up to 40 percent – is that the signs appear on the buttocks and genitalia.

Fortunately, most of the infections are limited to the skin surface, although the bacteria can penetrate deeper tissues or circulate through the bloodstream. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have reported that various forms of MRSA cause approximately 95,000 potentially life-threatening infections - and 19,000 deaths - annually in the United States.