Maryn McKenna’s book, SUPERBUG: THE FATAL MENACE OF MRSA, is an excellent example of why science journalism can offer more frights per column inch than anything a horror story could muster.
By necessity, horror novels and films relate a very small number of narratives, but award-winning science writer Maryn McKenna breeds narratives by the score about MRSA, a new and powerful form of staphyloccus. Consequently, SUPERBUG is a relentless barrage of terrifying stories, compounded to give readers the very experience that our medical community has from fighting the MRSA epidemic — namely, of being totally overwhelmed by this super staph bug.
What’s the big deal? Why are the germ and the book so scary?
Common staphyloccocus is, well, common. It’s everywhere. You are probably coated in garden-variety staph bacteria as you read this — your skin, your fingertips, and particularly your nose are good breeding grounds for staph. But it’s easily controlled with antibiotics and antibacterials. Meanwhile, MRSA (often pronounced “merssa”) is the acronym for methicillin-resistant Staphyloccocus aureus, a relatively new microbe that has grown resistant to modern antibiotics (like methicillin) that doctors use to fight common staph. As a result, it’s one tough bastard.
Here’s something to think about as you drift off to sleep: You could be “colonized” with MRSA — your nose and fingertips — and you wouldn’t even know it until it was too late. Thanks to the bug’s drug-resistance, routine cuts or scrapes can explode into massive pustules, deep bone infections, staphyloccocal pneumonia, organ failure, or even the need for amputations.
Nighty-night…
Because MRSA spreads through the human body so easily, it has also spread through the body of our species with similar swiftness. First identified in 1961 in the United Kingdom, the bug spread across the planet within a decade. From SUPERBUG:
“That speed and reach were stunning, even for a bacterium as ancient and inventive as staph. Investigators took it as proof of the dire impact that the introduction of antibiotics had on a long-established microbial world. They described it with concern as ‘accelerated evolution…condensed into a remarkably short time frame.’”
In horror show terms, the silver bullets we use against this werewolf (antibiotics) are making the werewolf stronger.
Worse, our safe havens from the monster are no help, either. Indeed, MRSA was thought to be a “hospital bug” for many years, stubbornly entrenched as it was in our medical facilities. New York Hospital nurseries, for example, were some of the first clinics to realize that they had been invaded by a drug-resistant germ, with newborns from all over the five boroughs falling ill simultaneously. From the book:
“The only thing [these babies] had in common were the New York Hospital nurseries where they spent their first few days of life. It seemed clear that the nursery was where they had become infected.”
In a slasher film, this is where the operator cuts in to the babysitter’s phone conversation with the killer, shouting, “Get out of there! He’s in the house with you!”
Vulnerability is a key emotion in good horror stories, and, by my read, her horror writer’s knack is very much to McKenna’s credit. SUPERBUG is loaded with well-researched and -cited evidence, but we aren’t just reading bland case studies from an academic journal. Thanks to McKenna’s sure hand as a storyteller, readers come to the same shocked and frightened realizations that medical professionals do, faced with this new, unpredictable germ. But we also feel the crushing demoralization of the Job-like New Jersey dj, “Big Jay” Sorenson, who becomes infected repeatedly with MRSA; the beleaguered parents of a terribly vulnerable fourteen-month-old boy make us ache with sympathy; and we feel a penetrating, creeping dread as we read about the prisons, schools, farms, and many public institutions that unwittingly spread MRSA. A scientific document with this kind of emotional impact is rare and welcome.
Unfortunately, SUPERBUG ends before the heroes can “win.” The alien isn’t ejected into space, and the ruined city doesn’t return to normal. In fact, what spurred staph to become drug-resistant in the first place, antibiotics, is still applying constant, evolutionary pressure: We’re still using, overusing, and misusing antibiotics. As McKenna shows with the companion villain, VRSA — that is, vancomycin-resistant staph — staph bugs are only getting trickier and stronger. As a result, the heroes are stuck at the end of SUPERBUG, because we still need to use the weapon (antibiotics) that teaches these monsters how to fight us.
For example, a small chapter of SUPERBUG is dedicated to livestock farmers’ routine use of antibiotics to prevent sickness in animals (more on this in Fair Food Fight’s interview with author Maryn McKenna). Agriculture’s use of antibiotics isn’t solely to blame for MRSA’s development, of course, but it does need to be examined and put in check, since ag professionals apply anywhere from 17.8 million to 29.5 million pounds of antibiotics per year (depending on whose studies you read). A CDC campaign to encourage “antibiotic stewardship,” which asked medical doctors to reduce prescribing antibiotics for childhood respiratory infections, lowered usage by 14% in 2002. We need Farm Bureaus and ag commodity associations to conduct a similar antibiotic stewardship campaign among livestock farmers. That, or a proposal in Congress to ban antibiotics must become law.
In any event, antibiotic-use can’t continue as it has, because here’s the underlying fact that makes SUPERBUG such a horror show: There is no cure for MRSA infection.
Only prevention works, at the moment. And what kind of prevention? What can stave of the bone-rinses, lengthy hospital stays, and organ failure that can accompany MRSA infection?
Washing hands.
Novant Health, a health care company of 16 hospitals and other health facilities in Charlotte, North Carolina, used a draconian system aimed at making sure medical staff washed their hands 90% of the time that they had the opportunity to do so. They reached an astonishing 99% effectiveness and dropped their incidence of MRSA significantly, while the germ was on the rise in hospitals everywhere else. It’s not a true silver bullet — washing up didn’t kill the monster outright — but it helped.
If that doesn’t make you want to take a thousand showers, I don’t know what will.
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The official website for SUPERBUG.
Below, Maryn McKenna discusses MRSA.
