Be On the Lookout

Pretty in pink: The deadly MRSA strain under a microscope.

Considering the alternatives, it's peculiar what the mainstream media chooses to scream about. Politics and terrorists and movie stars on drugs, housing starts and the stock market, and of course international strife and Obamacare, dominate. Next we get to hear about who's on "Dancing With the Stars" and what Miley Cyrus did, and someone named Taylor Swift and what she's wearing. And though the pings from that missing Malaysian plane still make headlines, there is nary a peep outside of JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) about something called MRSA, a horrible, terrible, life-threatening, limb-destroying Superbug roaming hospital corridors both here and abroad.

As an avid follower of all sorts of news, including print journalism, TV and the Internet, I knew almost nothing about this problem. Even after attending several information seminars pertaining to my upcoming, and now cancelled, hip surgery, I was still virtually in the dark on the subject. Then yesterday afternoon, on a casual neighborhood walk, I chanced to meet a lady whose husband has spent the last year fighting for life and limb, losing a hip and having a heart attack in a Boston hospital, all stemming from a deadly infection he picked up during a relatively minor outpatient surgical procedure. 

My neighbor called her husband's infection "mersa," and I pretended to know what she was talking about despite being clueless. Once home I did some research and learned a few of the dreaded facts. (Last year the number of cases rose from 21 infections per 1,000 people to 42 per 1,000, according to CDC statistics.) If I had not cancelled my surgery already, I certainly would have after reading about MRSA, which stands for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.

It seems like your doctor (and mine) should at least mention the existence of MRSA, and thus the possibility of contracting it, before strapping you onto the operating table and cutting you open. And we all certainly deserve to hear more about it than we do about Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy.