Washington Injury Law Blog

MRSA – or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – a germ that spreads by contact is a potentially deadly staph infection that is all too common in hospitals in Washington and across the United States. The scary part is that it can be on your skin right now. Many people are carriers of MRSA and are unaffected by it until they suffer a open wound injury.

The good news is that there is a simple test that hospitals can run to find MRSA before treating a patient and protocols for isolating outbreaks. The bad news is that hospitals have refused to put the test into routine use. Before you receive any treatment involving an open wound at a hospital, especially surgery, I would insist on a MRSA test being run on you skin. That way you will know you aren’t carrying the deadly germ and infect yourself. You will also know that if you get MRSA it was most likely from the hospital.

MRSA has been around for 40 years. But recently the outbreaks of it have escalated to an alarming level. 6 out of 7 people get MRSA from a health care facility. In 2007 the CDC issued a press release stating that MRSA was now killing more people than AIDS. The CDC estimated that in 19,000 people died from MRSA. Scary stuff!

Luckily, the Washington State Department of health just issued a new rule requiring all hospitals to report all patient cases linked to the deadly germ MRSA. Be careful at Harborview Medical Center, it is one of the local hospitals that has had a fairly significant problem with MRSA and currently lacks what I consider adequate safeguards against its spread.

Max Meyers, Esq.

Sources:

How our hospitals unleashed a MRSA epidemic

MRSA’s toll climbs, but hospital is slow to change

State to begin tracking hospital cases tied to deadly germ MRSA