Friday, March 6, 2009
MRSA shouldn't be funny, but...
We know new information about MRSA is of great interest to our readers, so here's an important news update from the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. An outbreak of community-acquired MRSA in San Diego has been traced back to...a hospital worker? a football team? No, a baby elephant!
But don't throw out your zoo passes yet. The CDC's brave investigators (you have to respect anyone who takes rectal samples from a herd of elephants) have isolated the behaviors which put one at highest risk of developing EA-MRSA (that's my suggested acronym for elephant-acquired Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Among the highest risk activities: bathing the elephant, doing his laundry, and...I'm not making this up...trunk blowing. A helpful footnote to the CDC report explains trunk blowing as "Caretakers blew air with their unmasked mouths into the calf's trunk to stimulate bottle feeding."
This funny story has a sad ending though. The 13 humans infected with MRSA recovered without surgery or hospitalization, but the little elephant that started it all failed to thrive and had to be put to sleep.
Labels: MRSA
posted by Stacey Butterfield at
10:18 AM
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