Don’t forget to wash your hands
Guard against drug-resistant staph, which spreads easily in households
The superbug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) can spread easily from people to household pets, says a new study that underscores the importance of frequent handwashing.
MRSA was once rare, and socalled staph infections used to be more easily treated with antibiotics, researchers note in The Lancet Infectious Diseases. But due in part to overuse of antibiotics, MRSA now infects hundreds of thousands of people and kills about 20,000 people each year in the U.S. alone.
For the current study, researchers took a closer look at what might happen inside the home to spread infections, focusing on the households of 150 otherwise healthy children who had been treated for MRSA infections along with 692 family members and 154 household cats and dogs.
“The household environment plays a key role in the transmission of MRSA in the community setting,” said senior study author Dr. Stephanie Fritz of Washington University in St. Louis. “This suggests that aggressive attempts to rid MRSA from household surfaces may significantly lower the number of MRSA infections we’re seeing now. It wasn’t just one patient who would get a staph infection but multiple members of a family,” Fritz said. “Within a year, we’d see many patients return with recurring infections.”
Staphylococcus aureus bacteria generally live harmlessly on the skin in about one-third of the human population. The bacteria can spread through skin-to-skin contact or by touching contaminated surfaces. A typical staph infection resembles a pus-filled bug bite and when it goes untreated or patients don’t respond to treatment it can cause complications like pneumonia, severe organ damage and death if it enters the bloodstream, bones or organs.
Researchers visited each home five times during a one-year period to obtain swab samples from people’s nostrils, armpits and groins. For cats and dogs, researchers collected samples from inside the nose and along the animals’ backs, where they’re most often petted.
Almost half of the people and nearly one-third of the cats and dogs had MRSA at least once over the course of the year-long study.
“Our study showed that cats and dogs were more likely to get staph from humans than the other way around,” Fritz said.
New strains of MRSA were 14 per cent less likely to show up in households where people frequently washed their hands.
People who practise frequent handwashing (with soap or hand sanitizer) after using the bathroom, before preparing food, before eating and after changing a diaper are less likely to bring staph into their homes, results suggest.