Protect your family from superbugs

Staph first showed up on the public radar in the mid-1950s. It emerged as a nasty bug that could cause skin infections like pimples and boils, but also life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia and meningitis. At the time, penicillin was the drug of choice to treat staph, but in less than a decade, the bacteria became resistant to this antibiotic. In 1959, another antibiotic, methicillin, was introduced, but in just two years, staph had mutated into methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), which is also resistant to a large cache of other antibiotics. Since the 1980s, the powerful drug vancomycin has been at the forefront of treating MRSA, but sure enough, the bacteria now show signs of developing a resistance to vancomycin, too. This increasing drug resistance means people with staph infections may have a life-threatening, potentially untreatable, illness.

As doctors struggled to find an effective treatment for Gaya's illness, the days dragged into weeks, and still the little girl lay fragile and feverish in her hospital bed. While her dad stayed home to care for her two brothers, Gaya's mom stayed with her constantly. Yael even slept each night on a cot set up in the hospital room. Doctors administered vancomycin intravenously every eight hours in a desperate effort to eradicate the staph infection from Gaya's system.

"The antibiotics made her veins feel like they were burning, so she was really crying after the first few doses," says Yael. "Because of the risks associated with staph, and the fear that it could be MRSA, they put us in a closed room – no coming in and no going out," to minimize the risk of transmission. How could a potentially deadly strain of staph infect a perfectly healthy, active girl like Gaya? Though in the past, staph infections have mainly been a concern for people in the hospital or living with compromised immune systems, it has somehow expanded its reach into the community and started infecting healthy people – particularly children.

Why children like Gaya are more susceptible to superbugs
Youngsters like Gaya are generally more vulnerable to infection than adults because they have regular physical contact with one another, share personal items and get frequent cuts, says Dr. Joseph Lam, a Vancouver pediatrician with training in paediatric dermatology.

"Children will share anything," says Louise Holmes, a nurse and educator at Vancouver Coastal Health – Communicable Disease Control. For example, with very young kids, "anything that's on the floor goes straight into their mouths, and they are always on top of one another when they play." This increases their risk of infection and may put kids in increased danger from newer, more antibioticresistant staph strains. There have already been outbreaks of MRSA at day cares and nursery schools, says Holmes. These cases of so-called "community associated" MRSA (CA-MRSA) have also been reported among sports teams and other populations living in close proximity to one another. CA-MRSA infections can be relatively minor, affecting only the skin and soft tissues, or they can be much more serious. Necrotic pneumonia, for example, can destroy the lungs in just 24 hours.

Staph is just one of many superbugs
Staph is but one of myriad alarming new superbugs. Other superbugs making recent headlines both here and abroad include SARS, the Ebola virus and the H5N1 strain of avian influenza. Infectious diseases claim tens of millions of lives around the world every year. HIV-AIDS infections continue to be a problem, and recent years have marked the appearance of malaria in North America, as well as the return of tuberculosis. According to the World Health Organization, two million people died of AIDS in 2007, more than one million a year die of malaria, and nearly two million might die of tuberculosis in any given year.

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