MRSA Superbug Invades Public Schools as Conventional Medicine Ignores Natural Cures

Friday, May 02, 2008 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: MRSA, superbugs, antibiotics

(NaturalNews) Schools in at least eight states have reported confirmed cases of students being infected with the "superbug" known as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) following the death of a 17-year old Virginia student late last year, and the deaths of a New Hampshire preschooler and an 11-year-old from Mississippi a week earlier. MRSA, it seems, is taking hold in the U.S. population.

In addition to the cases in those states, schools in North Carolina, West Virginia and Connecticut have reported infections among their students, and a high school district in Tucson, Arizona sent a letter home to parents advising them that one student had been infected and another suspected case was awaiting confirmation. In Chicago, officials at Naperville High School did not become aware that there had been two cases of MRSA among football players there in the previous month until an athletic trainer learned of the incidents and reported them to the administration.

MRSA is a strain of the common bacterium that causes "staph" infections. While such infections are normally easy to treat with a variety of antibiotics, MRSA is resistant to these medications. MRSA is easily killed, of course, by natural medicines such as colloidal silver, aloe vera gel, garlic or any number of additional antibacterial medicines from Mother Nature, but doctors and hospitals don't use medicine from Mother Nature, so they suffer under the illusion that MRSA has "no cure" and can't be effectively treated. The limitations of antibiotic chemicals, it seems, have become the mental limitations of physicians, too.

What is MRSA?

MRSA was first identified in the United States in 1968. The staph bacteria, which occurs naturally on human skin and in nasal passages, can cause minor infections of the skin or other soft tissue if it enters an open wound. In rare cases, however, the bacteria becomes "invasive," colonizing another part of the body. In these cases, the staph bacteria can infect the bloodstream, urinary tract, lungs or other organs and lead to potentially fatal complications, including pneumonia or the state of whole-body inflammation known as sepsis. Even in less severe cases, a staph infection can lead to skin necrosis and the development of painful abscesses.

Staph infections can be spread by skin-to-skin contact or by sharing a towel with an infected person. This makes staph epidemics particularly likely in institutional settings like hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, sports facilities and schools. In schools, athletes are particularly at risk - the crowding and lack of hygiene in gyms and locker rooms provide a perfect breeding ground for MRSA.

"These situations set up the perfect scenario for the organism to invade the skin," said Dr. Pascal James Imperato, former commissioner of public health for New York City and chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. "In this setting, you have sweat and good exposure to skin. With youths who play football or lacrosse, the skin might also be cut or scraped, making the skin more vulnerable."

In response to the recent death of a student from MRSA, students in Bedford County, Virginia, demanded that their schools be sterilized. After students organized themselves over text messages and the internet to protest the unsanitary conditions at their schools - including taking the Bedford County Schools Superintendent on a tour of one high school to demonstrate the problem - the schools agreed to comply with their demands. All 21 schools in the county were closed, scrubbed and sanitized on October 17. Schools were also sanitized in Indiana and West Virginia, with a particular emphasis on locker rooms and gyms.

In Illinois, state officials are considering a recommendation that would specifically encourage health care officials to report any cluster of MRSA - defined as three or more cases - in an institutional setting. This rule is intended to alert health officials to any potential epidemics in the making, before the infection spreads too widely. The recommendation was prompted by the recognition that it took officials at Naperville High School weeks to learn about the two infections in their football team, and the fact that infections diagnosed at off-site health care facilities may never be reported to the school.

MRSA now killing more Americans than AIDS

Concern over MRSA infections has increased not only from the recent deaths of grade-school students, but also by a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report concluded that MRSA infection is far more common in the United States than previously thought, and that it kills more people yearly than AIDS, emphysema, Parkinson's disease or homicide.

The CDC calculated that deaths from MRSA in the United States may amount to nearly 19,000 people yearly, although the agency added that it can be hard to determine if death is caused directly by the disease or merely accelerated by it. The CDC estimated the infection rate at 32 per 100,000 people, making even the rate of invasive MRSA higher than the combined rate of other invasive bacterial conditions, including bloodstream infections, meningitis and flesh-eating strep.

While MRSA is still most common in hospital settings, it is becoming increasingly common outside the health-care world as well. "Now we know there's also a community-acquired strain of MRSA," Imperato said. "That doesn't mean that it hasn't always existed. It's just that now, we have become knowledgeable about it."

Imperato said that staying clean - whether that means health-care professionals washing hands or athletes showering immediately after exercise - is the best way to avoid spreading MRSA.

"Good old-fashioned cleanliness serves as the best barrier to these organisms," he said. "Just washing with ordinary soap and water is enough to remove any of the organisms that may have colonized in the skin."

Why conventional medicine is clueless to stop MRSA

Conventional medicine has not merely failed to stop MRSA, it has in fact accelerated the development of MRSA through rampant use of chemical antibiotics. This created the perfect environment in which MRSA superbugs could grow and escape outside the hospitals, into "the wild," as it's called by infectious disease experts.

Even worse, doctors and hospitals have so far refused to treat MRSA with anything that actually works. Instead of looking to Mother Nature, where cures for MRSA are as common as weeds (literally!), arrogant doctors and Western medical researchers continue to foolishly believe that only synthetic, patented chemical antibiotics have any use whatsoever, and that anything from nature couldn't possibly be of any help.

They also don't appear to show any interest whatsoever in the technology of colloidal silver, a substance that quickly kills not just MRSA, but ALL antibiotic-resistant infectious strains. A quick wipe-down of hospitals, schools and gyms with colloidal silver would halt these MRSA infections in their tracks. Colloidal silver can also be used topically, on MRSA skin infections, where it quickly kills bacteria without any negative side effects whatsoever. One source I recommend, by the way, is www.Silver100.com

Consider this for a moment: Every plant in the world grows its own antibacterial medicine. If it didn't, bacteria would eat it up within hours. This is especially true of the roots of plants, because roots have to survive the onslaught of soil bacteria (which are present in very high numbers unless the soil has been treated with chemical pesticides, of course). Roots, therefore, contain powerful antibacterial medicine.

Doctors don't like to admit Mother Nature has already developed this technology that continues to elude the "best and brightest minds" in modern medicine. What's at stake here, of course, is the ego and pride of the whole system of Western medicine. If doctors, hospitals and researchers have to admit that Mother Nature has already engineered thousands of different cures for MRSA, then it sort of makes doctors look stupid for a couple of reasons. One, it means that plants are better at making medicine than drug companies (which, of course, they are), and two, it means all the doctors who have been holding out for the next "wonder" drug while overlooking the simple, natural cures available in their back yard begin to look like irrational defenders of a nearly-useless system of pharmaceutical medicine (which, of course, they are as well).

So there's a mass delusion being played out by Western medicine today where doctors pretend natural medicine doesn't exist and thereby claim that MRSA has no cure. This is the fountain of stupidity from which our current MRSA problems have sprung. Instead of using what works, modern medical hacks are more interested in protecting their intellectual territory, thereby denying patients access to (or knowledge of) those things that could reduce suffering or even save their lives. And thus, the bewildered, fumbling "experts" of Western medicine continue the charade of looking for the next great antibiotic medicine that will finally conquer MRSA, even while cures for MRSA are so common that you can't take a walk in the woods or a city park without seeing hundreds or thousands of them. (Those trained in Western medicine are literally blind to nature.)

What they conveniently forget, of course, is the simple fact that clever MRSA bacteria will mutate a new resistance to the next billion dollar antibiotic medicine in about a day or so. And that means that all the self-proclaimed brilliance of Big Pharma's researchers and chemists can be outsmarted by a single-celled organism that doesn't even have half a brain.