The first signs that you have possibly contracted MRSA are small red bumps that appear on the surface of your skin as a result of cellulites. Cellulites occurs directly under your skin and the infection spreads until the fat, tissues and skin all begin growing red in color, which is what will be visible to you. Boils, abscesses and impetigo are generally the symptoms that will follow the initial rash, and this is when most patients and doctors realise that there is an infection involved.

Boils appear around hair follicles where MRSA has been contracted and they begin to fill with pus becoming sore and painful. An abscess will be similar to a boil, only it will not be located around a hair follicle and just appear as a collection of pus on your skin. Impetus is the most common of all the symptoms and will contain many blisters that are filled with pus in a general area that has been infected.

The final two signs of MRSA are also associated with tenderness and pain in a certain parts of the body. Carbuncles are perhaps the most noticeable and worrisome of all the symptoms, leaving you with a large infected area that contains several abscesses and skin openings. Finally, a sty is location specific much like boils, but a sty is located in the glands of an eyelid. All of these symptoms are painful and require immediate attention from a doctor.

Lung infections from MRSA are more often than not caused by treatment in a hospital or other health facility. Because of the body’s natural defences, MRSA is regularly in contact with us but does not usually infect us. When patients are treated in a hospital setting though, they are put at a greater risk of infection from MRSA by other patients, health care providers and the tools that are used in the care of the patients. Many times patients contract lung infection from MRSA when a ventilator is used to help them breath during treatment or surgery. The addition of these ventilator tubes to the body increases the risk of MRSA forming and spreading to the lungs and causing severe pneumonia.

Regardless of the cause of the lung infection by the MRSA bacteria, the disease is very hard to fight and control. Patients who are already weakened from other treatments have a very hard time fighting off any additional infections, especially ones of this magnitude. Additionally, because of its resistance to medications, there is very little that can be done to treat the infection and the best defence for most patients are their immune system. Those that come into contact with patients who have contracted lung infections from MRSA must be very careful to scrub up afterwards as there is an increased risk of contamination.

In most cases, once MRSA is able to enter your bloodstream there is a one to ten day incubation period. The reason for this varied and unpredictable amount of time is unknown and very much unlike other infections which require a determined amount of time to spread and cause symptoms. The incubation period is believed to depend on the way the patient contracted the disease, but this is not certain. As there are two ways for a person to contract the disease, (the disease is already present on your body and enters through openings you may have on your skin or you touch something with MRSA on it and then it finds a way into your bloodstream), that both require it to enter your bloodstream and leave us with no clues as to how exactly the patient contracted MRSA, this is a very hard disease to determine.

Because the incubation period of MRSA relies on so many factors that all work together or against each other, MRSA is even that much harder to work with. This indefinite period is largely responsible for the rapid spread of MRSA in close quarters such as hospitals, schools and dormitories, because by the time anyone is showing the symptoms, the disease has already had the opportunity to spread. The best way to avoid any possibility of contracting the infection is through frequent and consistent washing, since that is the way in which the disease will spread.

The appearance of cellulitis in patients is the body’s natural response to the infection that has entered it. The immune system responds to bacteria and other pathogens that enter the bloodstream, and MSRA is a type of bacteria that does in actual fact head straight into the bloodstream from where it spreads to the entire body. The redness and inflammation that is noticeable on the skin, is cellulitis and is a direct result of the immune system attacking the infection.

Cellulitis can appear anywhere on the body and is usually present where the bacteria first was able to enter the body, either by way of a cut, scratch or something similar. If there is any doubt that the rash on the skin is cellulitis, it can be better determined if there is a warmness of the skin that is red. More advanced cases of cellulitis will begin to develop abscesses, blistering and ulcers in the infected area and it is very important to have this seen to and treated by a doctor. Upon healing, the skin infected and showing signs of cellulitis will begin to regenerate and the blistered areas will flake off like old skin.

In 2007 vital statistics regarding the outbreak of MRSA was released by the Centre for Disease Control in the United States. Startling with information from as recent as 2005, in the United States alone MRSA was responsible for the death of nineteen thousand people. Several thousand more cases of the deadly virus were contracted by patients in hospitals, with statistics reporting these cases as high as ninety four thousand.

The statistical data collected for MRSA also showed very important trends that those in the health care industry will find helpful in controlling the disease in future years. When it is known who is more susceptible to the disease, every measure can be taken to try and prevent patients from contracting MRSA. Older patients are the demographic that is most at risk for contracting MRSA and this is due largely to their advanced age and therefore weaker immune systems. The other telling demographic represented in the data is the African American community. The reasoning behind the data that supports a huge increase in the number of people of African American descent that contract the disease is the higher percentage of chronic disease which leads to more frequent hospital visits and stays.

While there is a lapse in statistics that are currently available, new data is always being provided and analyzed. By continuing to collect data on MRSA we improve our chances of reducing outbreaks to future hospital patients.

Once MRSA has found a way to enter the bloodstream, it has the ability to spread around the entire body, including the organs, making it extremely difficult to treat. All patients that are already sick or have been operated on for any reason and possess weakened immune systems, are the most susceptible group to these bacteria and could also contract other types of diseases and complications due to the MRSA.
From the very beginning it is a complicated procedure to try and treat someone who has contracted MRSA because the bacteria present are Methicillin resistant. This means they do not respond to treatments incorporating Methicillin which may work on other forms of the bacteria.

During the course of recent years, as the bacteria have managed to evolve, MRSA has developed a resistance to the main antibiotic used to treat it and has left us with little else to try and treat patients with. Left to spread in unsuspecting patients, MRSA can infect the lungs causing instances of pneumonia, infect the heart, bones, and liver, and even cause septic shock. Each and every one of these complications is very serious and can even lead to death among patients who are not able to recover from a serious infection of this type.

Health care workers can also be carriers for a colony of MRSA when proper post and pre-treatment procedures are not followed. Lack of proper hand washing, used surgical gloves, dirty surgical gowns and masks and medical instruments that have been used on more than one patient, are all different methods that a colony of MRSA bacteria can establish itself and grow.

The nonspecific characteristics of the bacteria also make it easier for it to grow and harder for us to control. Any surface of the skin is a great place for a colony to establish itself. Common places on a patient for colonised MRSA are areas such as the skin, near wounds or in the urine of an infected person. Even though we know that colonised MRSA does exist, it is difficult and almost possible to isolate a colony of MRSA or even those persons that may have colonies of the bacteria growing on them. Therefore it is necessary to consider all hospital patients as possible carriers and take the necessary precautions to eliminate the possibility of spreading the infection.