Healthy Me - At Home and Away: The Lancet

Showing posts with label The Lancet. Show all posts

Thursday, August 11, 2011

New MRSA 'superbug' found in cow's milk

Posted: 03 June 2011

LONDON - An entirely new strain of the drug-resistant MRSA superbug has been found in cow's milk and people in Britain and Denmark, a study published on Friday said.

The previously unseen variant "potentially poses a public health problem," said lead researcher Mark Holmes, senior lecturer in preventive veterinary medicine at Britain's Cambridge University.

There was no general threat to the safety of pasteurised milk and dairy products, but people working with animals could be at risk, said the study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Dubbed a "flesh-eating" bacteria in media reports, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has emerged as a major threat in hospitals around the world, becoming potentially deadly when it infects wounds.

"Although there is circumstantial evidence that dairy cows are providing a reservoir of infection, it is still not known for certain if cows are infecting people, or people are infecting cows. This is one of the many things we will be looking into next," Holmes told a news conference on Thursday.

"Drinking milk or eating meat is not a health issue, as long as the milk is pasteurized," he said, adding that the process of making cheese also "generally kills most of the bacteria".

Holmes said the main worry was that the new strain would be wrongly identified by traditional genetic screening tests as being drug-susceptible, meaning people could therefore be given the wrong antibiotics.

Colleague Laura Garcia-Alvarez, also from Cambridge University, said it was "certainly worrying" to find the new strain in both cows and humans but said the pasteurisation of milk would keep it out of the food chain.

"Workers on dairy farms may be at higher risk of carrying MRSA, but we do not yet know if this translates into a higher risk of infection," Garcia-Alvarez added.

The team stumbled on the new MRSA bug while investigating mastitis, a serious disease which affects dairy cows.

They found MRSA bacteria with the same mutated gene in 13 of 940 samples from 450 dairy herds in southwest England.

Tests on people treated for MRSA revealed the same new strain in 12 instances in Scotland, 15 from England and 24 from Denmark.

The scientists also spotted a "clustering" of human and cow samples containing exactly the same new strain, suggesting transmission between cattle and humans.

Separately another study released on Friday showed another new form of MRSA in hospitals in Ireland that is closely related to the previously unseen one found in Britain.

Like the British one, it is not detected by current genetic tests and is also found in cows, said the research published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.

"The results of our study and the independent United Kingdom study indicate that new types of MRSA that can colonise and infect humans are currently emerging from animal reservoirs in Ireland and Europe and it is difficult to correctly identify them as MRSA," said David Coleman of Dublin University.

"This knowledge will enable us to rapidly adapt existing genetic MRSA detection tests, but has also provided invaluable insights into the evolution and origins of MRSA," he added.

The announcement of the new types of MRSA comes a day after the World Health Organisation said a lethal E.coli bacteria that has killed 18 people in Europe is "extremely rare" and had never been seen in an outbreak form before.

-AFP/rt

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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
New MRSA 'superbug' found in cow's milk

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Common symptoms as good as lab trials to detect AIDS

I wouldn't be surprised by this discovery: our body would be simply reacting in the same way as it would for diseases - generally...
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Clinical symptoms just as good as lab trials for AIDS patients

GENEVA - AIDS sufferers whose treatments are assessed by simple clinical signs are almost on a par with those whose therapies are based on advanced laboratory analysis, the World Health Organisation said Friday.

A new study published in the British medical journal The Lancet reported that monitoring simple physical signs of deteriorating health, such as weight loss or fever, allows doctors to provide therapies almost as effective as those relying on laboratory tests.

"The results of this study should reassure clinicians in Africa and Asia, who are treating literally millions of people without these laboratory tests, that they are not compromising patient safety," said Charles Gilks, a co-author of the study and the coordinator of antiretroviral treatment and HIV care at the WHO.

"In fact, the outcome of their treatment is almost as good as those patients in the USA and Europe where laboratory-guided treatment is the norm," he said.

The five-year survival rate for patients who only had clinical monitoring was 82 percent, against 83 percent for those using laboratory tests.

The WHO recommends that in areas with limited resources, AIDS treatments should be determined by monitoring clinical signs alone. - AFP/fa

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Clinical symptoms just as good as lab trials for AIDS patients
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Thursday, April 16, 2009

‘C’ is not for Cleanliness

POINT OF VIEW
Perhaps the C grade for hawkers should be probationary

Derrick A Paulo
deputy news editor
derrick@mediacorp.com.sg

The recent mass food poisoning in Geylang will prompt some hawkers to be more hygienic and some Singaporeans to be a little choosier about where they eat.

But let’s not kid ourselves — for how long?

Our current standards of hygiene are “5/10 or worse”, Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan said last week. A far cry from the dark days of Sars, which saw a nation obsessed with hygiene.

So, if the goal is to use this latest unfortunate incident to improve hygiene for the long-term, food vendors need to be given more than just an earful.

It is clear that many Singaporeans don’t mind at all eating at a food stall with a C rating for hygiene — this was borne out by a Today poll and a separate one later by The Straits Times.

In fact, some Singaporeans go as far as to say that hygiene ratings here are inversely related to culinary standards and taste.

So what’s the incentive for stall holders to keep cleanliness standards high? Why not have a tiered rental system, where hawkers with A-grade hygiene pay a lower rental?

Financial carrots and sticks are a tried-and-tested tactic here, one which has in the past elicited a speedy change in behaviour and in some cases a lasting change.

Is it really asking too much of C-grade hawkers, who made up 14.3 per cent of all stallholders last year, to use gloves and tongs or cover cooked food?

The National Environment Agency uses a demerit-point system to deal with such omissions, which environment officers catch when they make their rounds once every six to eight weeks. But otherwise, hawkers can hang on to their C grade for life. Perhaps, the system needs to be less tolerant of lower hygiene standards and make the C grade a probationary grade.

Hawkers who do not improve to a “B” within, say, three months, should be suspended until the next round of checks.

And those with D grades — seven stalls out there scored 40 to 49 out of 100 — should be immediately suspended.

Mr Khaw has already said that he plans to bar any food stall operator with a C rating from operating within hospitals. It is a signal of what standards we ought to accept, and the rating system should take its cue.

Of course, hawkers need the help of their customers and food centre operators to keep their surroundings clean.

The World Health Organisation marked World Health Day last week with the message that food safety is a shared responsibility. Now is the time to make some changes to that end.

From TODAY, News – Monday, 13-April-2009