Being a Pet Owner May Increase Your Risk of MRSA
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria like MRSA is a rising concern in the medical community. Now newer studies are showing that you may be more at risk than you initially thought.
There were already specific groups of people that were at a high risk for contracting the MRSA bacteria – mainly people who were staying in a long term care facility or hospital, the staff at such places, and the families. With so many potential infected or colonized MRSA patients in one place, it is relatively easy for the disease to be passed back and forth.
Then, MRSA started popping up in the community among people who were previously considered low risk. Sports teams, day cares, and even prisons became potential breeding grounds for the super bug.
Now, if you come down with a bacterial infection like MRSA, you might not just be making a trip to your family doctor. You may need to also make a trip to your family vet. The University of Missouri-Columbia has found that there could be a chance that your pet is acting as a reservoir, harboring MRSA and other bacterias.
Infections of antibiotic-resistant infections used to be only a problem with patients that were recovering from surgery or needing invasive medical procedures. However, the increase in community-acquired MRSA has led doctors and scientists to take a closer look at the potential environmental factors that could be causing these infections or making them more difficult to cure.
MRSA bacteria can be found on the skin and in the nose of people and animals. While it is there, the person may never get sick or have any symptoms cluing them in to its existence. The MRSA bacteria only become a problem when they manage to get into the tissues of the body and the blood stream. When that happens, it can become infections, sometimes one serious enough to cause life-threatening problems and even death. Surgery patients and hospitalized people used to have the highest risk, because of already weakened immune systems and areas on the body where bacteria could enter, such as surgery sites or punctures from IV catheters. However, with MRSA infections showing up in parts of the population, there is some concern that pets may have a paw in it.
Since the 1970s, the number of MRSA infections has been on the rise. In 1974, only about two percent of the staph infections were MRSA infections. Twenty-one years later, in 1995, it was up to 22 percent of the staph infections were antibiotic-resistant. Less than a decade later and rates had climbed up to 63 percent.
There is a study going on in Canada, research over 750 pairs of owners and pets. The samples collected are being sorted into three groups: people who work in human healthcare and their pets, people who work in veterinary medicine and their pets, and people and their pets that do not fit into the first two groups. The goal is to see if there is any real correlation between pet owners, jobs, and the number of MRSA infections and colonizations.
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