The New Killer Diseases by Elinor Levy

Author:Elinor Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307422217
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

BACTERIAL RESISTANCE: The Dangers of Antibiotics and Hospitals

Football fans might be familiar with the dramatic story of Shane Matthews, which was widely reported in the media. He was the Chicago Bears’ starting quarterback for the autumn 1999 season. At six feet three inches and 204 pounds, the twenty-nine-year-old threw hard and scrambled fast. Massive, angry linebackers would grind him into the turf when they sacked him, but Number 9 would get up, shake off the hit, and call the next play. As the Bears’ season ended, though, Matthews found himself nursing a hernia, which happens to professional football players. He went in for double-hernia surgery as soon as the season was over. Doctors cut open his groin, repaired the damage, and sewed him up.

Matthews was sore for the first few days. He was back home in early January 2000, but then he got sick.1 He went to his doctor for tests and the results indicated he had a staph infection. Dangerous staph bacteria creeping around at the hospital had gotten into his surgical wound. A doctor’s hands might have been contaminated with unseen bacteria from a previous patient and rubbed off onto Matthews’s raw scar following surgery. Or the pathogens might have been lurking on the counter of a nurse’s station, left there when a nurse who had just changed another patient’s bandage rested her hand there without washing it. Another unsuspecting nurse who was preparing to change Matthews’s dressing after surgery could have then placed her hand on the same counter before going into his room.

However it invaded, the bacteria quickly established a beach-head in Matthews’s body. His doctor prescribed an antibiotic. It did nothing. He put Matthews on another drug, then a mixture. They did little. Matthews spent the next three months on his back in the same hospital, and nearly died. By the end of April 2000 his weight had dropped to 174, but finally his condition started to improve. It took that long for even his big, tough body to beat back the staph bacteria that the drugs didn’t seem to touch. Finally back home, he could barely walk to his mailbox. It took ten months for him to recover, but he found himself a weaker and slower player. He was now a free agent, but no team wanted him. The Bears finally took him back as a third-string quarterback, with little intention of putting him on the field during a game. After that miserable season, Matthews went on a crash program to rebuild his beaten body, and two years later, in August 2002, he clawed his way back to being a starting quarterback, this time for the Washington Redskins.

Why didn’t drugs defeat the bacteria infecting Matthews? Staph is nothing exotic. It’s been combated for years by antibiotics. But unfortunately for Matthews, the staph that invaded his body had developed resistance to the drugs commonly prescribed to beat it.

Just like E. coli, staph and many other pathogens are evolving in scary ways. The more researchers investigate, the more fast-changing microbes they find.

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