Read This Before You Take Yet Another Antibiotic

Deadly MRSA superbug has 50 percent mortality rate in hospital patients
A recent Henry Ford Hospital study revealed that a new strain of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the deadly bacterial "superbug" that becomes resistant to many antibiotics, is five times more deadly than other previously-seen strains. Fifty percent of patients who become infected with the new virulent strain die within 30 days; other MRSA strains kill only about 11 percent.

Called USA600, the new strain possesses uniquely noxious characteristics that researchers are linking to the significantly higher mortality rate. Study findings were presented at the 47th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America in Philadelphia.

Typical MRSA strains are problematic because they are resistant to virtually every available antibiotic drug. Most MRSA infections are allegedly treatable with vancomycin, a powerful intravenous drug, but the new USA600 strain has proven itself to be nearly impervious to the drug.

Deadly MRSA strains typically take hold on a person through skin and blood infections, as well as through surgical wounds. While predominantly contracted in health care facilities like hospitals and clinics, the disease is now starting to make the rounds in otherwise healthy people in the outside world.

Experts are associating the increased resistance of deadly MRSA strains to the over-prescription by doctors of antibiotics for all sorts of conditions that do not need them. According to Joel Fuhman, an M.D. from New Jersey, studies show that 90 percent of antibiotics are prescribed for viral diseases, against which they have no effect.

When antibiotics are prescribed needlessly for conditions like a child's ear infection, which is viral rather than bacterial, they do more harm than good by killing off the child's beneficial bacteria. As a result, the child's immune system is weakened making them more susceptible to developing other illnesses and being prescribed more antibiotics.

Europe's Centre for Disease Control warns that if excessive antibiotic use is not curbed, antibiotics will become all but useless and modern medical procedures like organ transplants and neonatal care for babies will no longer be possible.

Modern medicine must also reawaken to the incredible power of colloidal silver in stopping harmful bacteria, viruses, and fungal infections. Studies show that there is virtually no bacterial strain resistant to silver's powerful antibacterial effects. When developed properly for therapeutic use, colloidal silver packs a punch unlike any other antibiotic.

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Antibiotic Threat

There was a time when the question, "When will infectious disease be wiped out?" was a realistic, seemingly achievable question.

Now the new realistic question seems to be, "When will the next deadly plague occur?"

We have read about and feared AIDS and MRSA. Super bug is now a part of our vocabulary as often as the "24 hour bug" was twenty years ago. We find E. coli and Salmonella in our produce and peanuts and who knows what else on an alarmingly regular basis. Old diseases like tuberculosis are "making a come back".

Many infections are able to withstand most, if not all antibiotics. We, however, continue to take antibiotics for the most minor ailments thus causing a plethoa of bacteria and viruses to develop immunity to the drugs that were ironically created to eradicate infections in the first place.

According to the NY Times, there is a "new" bacteria to add to the list. It is Clostridium difficile, an infectious bacterium that attacks as a stomach bug. It causes an estimated 350,000 cases per year in hospitals alone and kills an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people per year.

The disturbing problem with this bacteria is that antibiotics can actually trigger this bacteria to strike. Because antibiotics kill both good and bad bacteria in the body, often times upon completion of an antibiotic our immune system is missing the healthy bacteria. If we come in contact with C. difficile, it can create an opportunity for this bacteria to flourish.

The article further states that in some cases the only treatment for C. difficile is to remove the patients colon, and relapses are not uncommon once a patient has recovered.

To read the article in it's entirety, please click here.

Stories like this continue to reinforce to me the importance of a healthy immune system, in addition to thinking twice about taking antibiotics as well as any other pharmaceutical drug unless absolutely necessary.

It also provides yet again incentive to explore the many choices available to us for alternative antibiotics and many other products that help us live healthy and naturally.

MRSA - Not Just In Hospitals Anymore

A Deadly Bug Invades Our Towns
By Dr. Ranit Mishori
Publication Date: 12/07/2008

A few years ago, I began noticing an unusual number of patients coming in with what they described as spider bites. In clinics and emergency rooms across the U.S., colleagues were seeing it, too: Young people and old, male and female, complaining about a skin sore not unlike a pimple, often red and swollen, sometimes oozing and painful. The only thing was, very few of these patients recalled being bitten by a spider or any other kind of insect.

That’s because, in most of these cases, it wasn’t an insect. But it was a bug—a bacterium called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, better known to most of us now as MRSA. These patient complaints were clear signs of what is now a MRSA epidemic.

According to a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, MRSA caused more than 94,000 life-threatening infections and nearly 19,000 deaths in the U.S. in 2005. One study in The New England Journal of Medicine found MRSA 59% of the time when adults came to emergency rooms with skin infections.

MRSA is not new. It has been plaguing our hospitals for decades. It kills by infecting the blood and lungs of very sick patients or those recovering from surgery. But at least doctors knew—o r thought—that if you weren’t a hospital patient in weakened condition, MRSA wasn’t going to find you.

“That is no longer true,” says Dr. Robert Daum, a pediatrician and infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Chicago. “Hospital transmission is not what’s driving the epidemic disease we see everywhere.” New strains of MRSA have been born outside hospital walls and are finding anybody and everybody. That includes, says Dr. Rachel Gorwitz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “otherwise healthy people in the community, including children.”

Consider Susan Wagoner, 49, a businesswoman from Scottsdale, Ariz. MRSA first appeared as a small abscess on her upper leg. Even though she was treated with antibiotics, the abscess grew larger, and then another one developed elsewhere. The pain became excruciating. As weeks turned into months, her illness forced Wagoner to quit her job, and she says, “I began looking into funeral arrangements.”

Grant Hill, the NBA all-star, contracted MRSA a few years ago as a skin infection near his ankle, and he had to spend a week in the intensive-care unit. “I was lucky to survive,” Hill says.

Not so lucky was an 18-month-old in Chicago named Simon Sparrow, in good health before MRSA got into his lungs. Once it took hold there, even the most aggressive treatment could not rescue the toddler.

These new strains of MRSA—not all as deadly as the one that afflicted Simon—are showing up all over the community: Read More

MRSA In The News

Click here to view a CNN Video about the Superbug, MRSA

Once again MRSA (staphylococcus aureusis) is in the news. CNN tells us that MRSA could soon kill more people annually than AIDS. Currently MRSA affects over 100,000 people annually in the US alone.

MRSA, a strain of staph infection, is resistant to antibiotics, therefore earning the title of Superbug. MRSA is typically contracted in hospitals and is highly contagious.

To prevent the spread of MRSA, health care professionals recommend washing hands often and to eliminate sharing anything that can transfer bacteria to others, for example soda cans, water bottles, wash cloths etc.

An alternative choice, colloidal silver, is available and has been clinically proven to kill staph infections including MRSA. Following is a portion of an article about a study that proved colloidal silver's ability to eliminate MRSA:

March 31st, 2006 - Brigham Young University, Salt Lake City, UT Noted Molecular Biologist and Microbiologist Dr. Ron Leavitt, Ph.D. has recently conducted tests to determine the ability of American Biotech Labs' nanoparticulate Silver Solution to destroy pathogenic microorganisms. His testing results against many of the world's most virulent pathogens were outstanding, including the scourge of institutional infections, staphylococcus aureus.

Staphylococcus aureusis the bacteria that causes infections in millions of Americans annually, killing more than 100,000 every year. The nano-silver product killed this highly contagious bacteria in minutes. Dr. Leavitt's findings were so definitive that he stated, "There are no potentially pathogenic bacteria tested that this nano-particulate engineered Silver Solution has not killed."

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Silver Solution has been tested at 200 times the normal dosage rate and has not been found to be toxic even at this extreme dosage. This, combined with the bodies resistance to conventional antibiotics as well as the side effects experienced by some, makes colloidal silver a growing alternative choice to many people opting to live their lives more naturally.


Click here to read another article referencing studies on colloidal silver.