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Saturday, Aug 30, 2008
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Report of 'flesheating bacteria' outbreak in Gay men causes controversy |
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| Report of 'flesheating bacteria' outbreak in Gay men causes controversy | |
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by Nick Ardizzone -
SGN Staff Writer Last week's report in The New York Times of a drug-resistant strain of "flesh-eating bacteria" in Gay communities in San Francisco and Boston caused a nationwide reaction. The bacteria in question is MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a common, usually benign bacteria with an estimated 53 million worldwide carriers. After reading the Times' take on the Annals of Internal Medicine's report (www.annals.org), some concerned citizens were sent scrambling for information, while others used the story as ammunition for their own agendas. The report moved Peter LaBarbera, of the anti-Gay group Americans for Truth (www.americansfortruth.com), to wonder on his website, "Why isn't there a concerted government effort - akin to the current anti-smoking campaigns - to reign in homosexual promiscuity - beginning with closing down all sex businesses (bathhouses) that facilitate homosexual perversion? & We know that bisexual behavior (men on the 'down low') help spread dangerous diseases to the general population: how many deaths and illnesses have to result from 'second-hand sodomy' before authorities take corrective action?" Not to be outdone, far-right group Concerned Women for America (www.cwfa.org) issued a press release which read, in part, "The human body is quite callous in how it handles mistreatment and the perversion of its natural functions. When two men mimic the act of heterosexual intercourse with one another, they create an environment, a biological counterfeit, wherein disease can thrive. Unnatural behaviors beget natural consequences." Faced with attacks rather than sympathy, some members of the GLBT community have been left wondering if the Times report was a newsworthy health story or a shameless grab for attention. A few leading Gay editors have already spoken out against what they believe was an overblown, alarmist report. "So we've all been hearing about the Gay outbreak of drug-resistant staph infections, same as we heard about multiple-drug resistant staph infections back in 2003," writes Washington, D.C. Metro Weekly editor Sean Bugg on his blog (www.seanbugg.com). "These kinds of infections have been a problem in medical settings for some time, but when a report comes out that attaches 'Gay' with 'disease,' everyone's certain to pay attention." Duncan Osborne, an associate editor at New York's Gay City News, sent a letter to the The New York Times blasting the story. "Your reporter, Lawrence K. Altman, wrote 'the bacteria seemed to be spread most easily through anal intercourse.' The authors of the study did not reach that conclusion. At the very start of the online study, they wrote that 'sexual risk behavior was not assessed.' & I question if Altman actually read this study. I do not see how a person can reach the conclusion that Altman reported when the study unambiguously did not support that conclusion." Osborne goes on to point out that the first reports of the resistant strain were from schoolchildren, athletes and prisoners. "Far from being Altman's modern-day Typhoid Mary," he writes, "Gay men are merely the latest population to contend with MRSA." PUBLIC HEALTH SEATTLE & KING COUNTY CAUTIONS AGAINST MRSA HYSTERIA To assess the risk posed by MRSA and determine its possible impact on the Seattle community, the Seattle Gay News spoke with Matthew Golden, Director of the Public Health Seattle & King County STD Control Program and Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington. Golden says that MRSA infections among Gay populations are nothing new. "We've known since at least 1997 there have been reported problems with MRSA among men who have sex with men. In 1997 there was an outbreak of MRSA reported in New York City among Gay men, and it was with the strain that's called USA300. That same strain, years later - I believe in 2002 - came up in an outbreak in bathhouses in Los Angeles, demonstrating that this bug & has really established a toehold in the [Gay] population." How much of a threat is "superbug" USA300? "In Seattle, most of MRSAs - and this is true, even now - are susceptible to certain other antibiotics, including doxycyclin - a type of tetracyclic antibiotic - and Bactrim. This bug in San Francisco, USA300, is not susceptible to tetracyclines & that's a lot of the reason why it's in the news." "It is susceptible to Bactrim," he stressed. "It's harder to treat, more resistant, but it is not an incurable plague." Though the full numbers for last year have yet to be released to the public, Golden had the compiled MRSA data for 2007 on hand. "We had very little resistance to doxycyclin," he said as he looked over the data, "which is good news. Some of [the resistant strains] were probably hospital-acquired infections - again, good news, since that would mean the community-acquired numbers would be smaller still & In 2007, 84% of [King County's] MRSA was susceptible to tetracyclines." Golden points out that Seattle's Harborview Medical Center does not usually use tetracyclines to treat MRSA, but instead uses a type of low-resistance Bactrim, to which MRSA has a 93% susceptibility rate. "Moreover, those resistance numbers are really flat," he explained. "They're not changing year-to-year much. And again, the seven percent, this doesn't mean they were USA300." "I think it's an important problem," he said, "but I don't think the sky is falling." |
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