We've seen more news about the superbug, especially with the reported death of a 12 year old New York student. On top of that, the virus has been found in other school in Virginia, after the death of a student there according to stories. What is scary is how this and a few other viruses have evolved to thwart man's best efforts, though that isn't much of a surprise if you know basic science. Once a problem in hospitals, the problem has left the hospital setting and now kills more people a year thanthe AIDS virus.(Source)

Questions for debate:

1)How big of a problem is this?

2.)Are we now entering a new era whereby drug resistant viruses will become the largest threat to our health?

1) I think this is going to be a huge problem. It seems like once every hundred years, there's some huge bug that goes around and does a little population control. Of course, you could argue that war does the same thing...

2) Could be. And it's our own fault, in my opinion. Antibacterial soap, over-prescribed antibiotics. Have you ever seen the Lysol commercial where the mom sprays a bouncy-ball thingy before giving it to her toddler? I wanted to climb through my TV and strangle her. Thank God I grew up with hippy parents who weren't scared of a little dirt.

This is why I'm moving to the country---ASAP.

1)How big of a problem is this?

Its big, it's bad, and it's scary. As I am writing this- I have two poeple in my line of site right now that are diagnosed with it. Or rather, one diagnosed, one that had it, and the last deep tissue sample said it had been eradicated. What is scary is this- I don't think you are going to have an "outbreak" of this among healthy poeple- but those that have some sort of routine or elective surgery SHOULD be scared- this stuff is in hospitals, big time.

2.)Are we now entering a new era whereby drug resistant viruses will become the largest threat to our health?

No way- I don't think so at all. There are lots of far worse, on the grand scale of things, that are the LARGEST threats to health- smoking, drinking and stress, obesity etc- far bigger threats than MRSA will ever be. In fact, I think we are really starting to move away from "drug resistant strains" in the old definition of the term- meaning, anti-biotic, not neccesarily "all drug" resistant. For instance- we have taken a new approach to combating malaria- thank bill gates and the scientists working on it for this one- but a Malaria vaccine has been introduced, by using mosquitoes to produce the vaccine. You can have all the drug resistant strains of malaria you wish- but you will not catch it if vaccinated against it- the best system, your own immune system, will do the fighting now.

I dont' think we will ever get rid of anti-biotics, but we are really starting to go truly new bio-tech angles in disease control, and seeing a bit of a reluctance, in the scientific community, to consider the anti-biotic as teh be all and end all of disease prevention.

I would like to make a sematic note: viruses are not affected by antibiotics, bacteria are. For the most part, most viral diseases are handled quite well by the body and much of the immune system is well adapted to handle viruses, and the few it can not handle well, ...well people die, such as in the flu pandemic of 1918.

A "staph" infection, like the one the child in the news died of, refers to a bacterium, not a virus....there is a big biologic difference. Bacteria are considered to be living organisms, viruses are not. At best, viruses are on the very fringe of the notion of life.

Blurring the distinction between those two "bugs" may be one of the reasons many people tend to demand antibiotics when it is not needed. That sort of uninformed demand is good if you sell antibiotics, but bad if one wants to limit the overuse of antibiotics to avoid the inadvertant development of superbugs. Even if an individual in futility gulps down antibiotics for a viral problem, benign bacteria in the body are also exposed to it, possibly developing resistance to it. That resistance may be passed on to more virulent bacteria. Also, if someone doesn't finish the antibiotics they receive, leftovers are occassionally reused by other family members improperly, and the problem can spread potentially turning everyone improperly using antibiotics into superbug incubators.

1)How big of a problem is this?

My understanding is that Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus is resistant to all antibioitics except vancomycin. This is a problem, because it means that we are down to only having one possible weapon against it, and because vancomycin is closely related to penicillin so, if you're alleric to penicillin, they can't treat you with vancomycin because while it might cure your infection, the allergic reaction might kill you anyway. Plus, as vancomycin is one of the "drugs of last resort" doctors are unwilling to use it unless they have to for fear of producing even-more-super superbugs. And, it has rather common and unpleasant side-effects anyway.

There is a much rarer, related bug called VRSA which is resistant to even vancomycin. Don't come down with that, if you can avoid it.

All that said, Staph. aureus is a very common bug and is only an opportunisitc pathogen i.e. it lives on the skin and mucous membranes of almost every person all the time, and only causes infections in wounds or in people with compromised immune systems (both of which are why MRSA infections are usually only a problem for people being treated in hospital for something else. It isn't only because the hospitals are dirty, as the British press would have you believe - though that can't be helfpful.).

It is very unlikely that Staph. aureus will ever be the cause of any massive-scale epidemics that kill or harm measureable percentages of the population the way that - say, bubonic plague or tuberculosis used to do. If either of those two ever develop significant and wide-spectrum antibiotic resistance, then we really will be in trouble.

In turn, this ubiquity is part of the problem - because it lives on and in everybody all the time, any time anybody takes antibiotics for some other infection, Staph. aureus gets a dose, often a small one - if for example you take oral antibiotics for a urinary infection, even if you finish the full course as directed, you won't kill off all of the bacteria on your skin because the skin doesn't excrete high levels of a-b's* (which is why you'll be prescribed an a-b cream or lotion for most skin infections).

Any Staph. aureus that survive get used to that particular antibiotic, even if the actual pathogen causing the infection being treated are all killed.

2.)Are we now entering a new era whereby drug resistant viruses will become the largest threat to our health?

metropolitical has already pointed out your (almost certainly inadvertant) confusion between bacteria and viruses. This is a very common error, and, as he says, may be linked to why antibiotic resistance has become a problem in the frist place. (But not entirely - bugs like MRSA are at least as likely to have arisen as a side effect of treatment for other infections, as I've indicated, as they are through misapplication or sloppy usage.)

In the worst *RSA case - Staph aureus strains resistant to all antibiotics - we'll get about halfway towards the levels of surgical infection and subsequent mortality we saw prior to the introduction of antibiotics (because medicine has improved in other areas) - which doesn't augur well for the poor, the old, the young, or anyone actively involved in warfare. Or childbirth. The situation would be very grave, but our number would not be up as a species or as a civilisation.

In the worst possible bacterial case - some new and virulent strain of a true pathogen like pneumonic plague or TB would emerge that was resistant to all drugs, had very high infectivity - say, 70% of all people exposed come down with the lurgy - and very high mortality - say, 40% of that 70% (i.e. 28% of the general population) - died from their illness.

Again, even in this scenario it's unlikely that the human race would die out as a species - but it would be very hard to envisage that civilisation(s) could carry on as they are when more than 1 in 4 people were dropping untimely dead.

edited to add: *I orginally typed this without the apostrophe, which is more gramatically correct for a plural abbreviation, but which got me *** NOTICE: THIS WORD IS AGAINST THE RULES. FAILURE TO REMOVE IT WILL RESULT IN A STRIKE. *** because the filter thought I was talking about the faecal matter of bovine males. Oh well. A couple of years yet before computers take over the world...