Yet Another Deadly Superbug Surfaces

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I can imagine the homophobic mob now…

“First the gays bring us AIDS, and now a deadly new supervirus.”
Though I sure as hell hope I don’t actually hear it. But that’s what the undereducated, the ignorant, and the foolish tend to do. They take facts out of context and misappropriate them for their own purposes. And the following is a sampling of the reported facts.

A deadly strain of the MRSA superbug has been found. MRSA, if you don’t know, stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureaus. Basically, it is an antibiotic-resistant staph infection. Now, "resistant" does not mean that antibiotics are completely ineffective against the bacteria. Rather, it means that higher, more frequent doses and often multiple antibiotics are required to combat the bug.

In the past, outbreaks have been found largely in hospitals, but this strain, like AIDS in its infancy, seems to be affecting the gay community most.

Research suggests it may be more prevalent among the gay community - the gay San Francisco district of Castro appears to have been hardest hit.

...

Researchers say the bug has so far been 13 times more prevalent in gay men in San Francisco than in other people.

In the Castro district - where more gay people live than anywhere else in the US - about one in 588 people are carrying the bug.

In the general San Francisco community the figure was around one in 3,800.
News of MRSA is nothing new. We’ve seen several new forms of the bacteria since then, and now there is a new strain...Strain #17, USA300. Like other strains, symptoms include large boils on the skin and – how’s this for terrorizing? – can cause fatal blood poisoning or even a flesh-eating form of pneumonia.

Skin-to-skin contact allows transmission of the bacteria, and drug users and those involved in contact sports are also at a higher risk. In addition, Dr Binh Diep, from San Francisco General Hospital Medical Centre, states:

These multi-drug resistant infections often affect gay men at body sites in which skin-to-skin contact occurs during sexual activities.

But because the bacteria can be spread by more casual contact, we are also very concerned about a potential spread of this strain into the general population.
Maybe I’m being finicky, but I don’t particularly like when comments like that seem to indicate that drug users or gays or whoever are not parts of “the general population.” Probably being finicky…

But what I’m really worried about – with regards to the sexuality link – is this strain of MRSA being treated as justification for more homophobia and discrimination against the gay community. Though some doctors are saying that it’s “not the new HIV,” the fact that such comparisons are being brought up is just scary. I’m hoping we won’t have to fight both the world health and the intolerance issues.

Fatality says to hug someone gay today. Maybe twice since, unfortunately, she doesn’t think she will get the opportunity to…

web address: http://suicidegirls.com/news/geek/22920/Yet-Another-Deadly-Superbug-Surfaces/