Staph Infection

DIGG THIS

An old and dear friend of mine wrote to express disbelief about my articles on the MRSA menace. He had some pimples, he got a shot, they went away. Where’s the problem?

To explain the problem, in part, I sent him three photos of my staph infection. First, we must remember that staphylococcus is a natural occurring bacteria on our skin and in our environment. Our bodies likewise have natural defenses against this bacteria. Normally, if we cut our skin, these defenses go to work, bringing on discoloration and swelling around the wound, which usually goes away in a couple of days.

I must make clear that I’m talking about plain old staph here, not MRSA.

My case was simple. I fell off a dark ramp to a restaurant with a take-out carton of food in hand and landed on the edge of a concrete walk, shattering my left radius. This is called a Colles’ fracture. It was a tough one to pin back together, but the orthopedist did it. I was pleased, but a week before the cast was to come off, it started to stink of staph and I started to feel sick – my immune system was responding.

The cast was removed, he pulled out the pins, and there was a small area of skin infection, maybe half an inch in diameter, which he doused with Betadine. He put me on Keflex for five days. That infection went down the pin holes into the bone. I went back a week later with this:

You can see the cast line on my hand here, and the infection site encompasses all four pin holes. The doctor said he had never seen anything like it. But he did write a prescription for Augmentin for ten days.

I knew I was in trouble at this point, so I started my own routine. I soaked the arm in a pan filled with warm water mixed with salt, Betadine, and bleach for twenty minutes a day and I picked out the dead tissue and solidified pus with forceps. That worked, but about the time that lesion healed up, this one broke out:

That is under the wrist. The doctor said he’d never seen anything like it, and he put me on another ten days of Augmentin. By this time, I must say, I was too sick to argue, although I knew this guy was brushing me off. Then we got this:

You will note that the first lesion is healed up. These lesions appeared above the last one under the wrist. The doctor said he had never seen anything like it.

A normal staph infection is serious business. I was afraid of sepsis, of osteomyelitis, and of endocarditis, none of which occurred thanks to the antibiotic and the daily cleaning routine. However, I remained sick for a year.

Yesterday I found a new product called StaphAseptic at Amazon. I don’t know if it works, but it claims to kill even MRSA at skin wound sites. Maybe if I’d had this product three years ago, I would not have had the problem.

MRSA, by contrast, is staph that is resistant to penicillin-type antibiotics, like Augmentin. I did not have MRSA. This "superbug" either escaped from hospitals and mutated, or escaped from bioweapons labs in its present form. It can be defeated with Vancomycin, but there is already another variety of resistant staph lurking in hospitals called VRSA.

Why do I keep writing about this? Because we cannot trust the powers-that-be to either keep us informed, which was the CDC mandate, or to protect us from sloppy incompetence in medical care. The system doesn’t work because it’s controlled by nameless, faceless bureaucrats who don’t care about medicine or public health, including the doctors and nurses on their payroll. The system can be fixed: Shut down the NIH, the CDC, and JCAHO, shut down bioweapons "research" and destroy their spawn, and outlaw lobbying. If hospital administrators and boards of directors and doctors see that they cannot hide behind the "rules" of the bureaucrats, they will stop this epidemic of infections. In lieu of that unlikely scenario, we owe it to ourselves to keep informed and skeptical.

July 10, 2007

Robert Klassen [send him mail] retired from a forty-year career in critical-care respiratory therapy. He is the author of five books, including Atlantis: A Novel about Economic Government, and Economic Government, which describe a solution to the problem of political government. Here's his web site.

Copyright © 2007 Robert Klassen

Robert Klassen Archives