Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Health care workers have called it MRSA for years. It's a technical term for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And yep, that phrase - antibiotic-resistant - is sure to scare some people. That's because healthy folks are getting these hard-to-treat staph infections, some of which can become quite serious.

“This past year there has been a tremendous increase in the number of boils, abscesses, and hair follicle infections that my colleagues and I have needed to treat.”

That was the first sentence of a memo Dr. Jon Yost, a pediatrician at Bay Clinic, sent to principals, athletic directors, coaches and nurses in the Coos Bay School District. But Yost wasn't trying to scare anyone. Rather, he wants school officials' help, because more and more MRSA cases are afflicting young people in the community, and those cases are preventable.

Learn the ABCs

“It's basically good hygiene,” Yost said.

Wash your hands with hot water and lather up with lots of soap bubbles. Clean skin wounds and keep them covered. Don't share towels and clothes. Keep athletic equipment clean.

That message also needs to get to students, particularly kids in contact sports such as wrestling. At Marshfield High School, wrestling coach Randy Messner said coaches statewide have become very vigilant about preventing staph infections and even parasites such as ringworm over the past several years.

“It was really bad five or six years ago,” he said.

While neither Messner nor MHS Athletic Director Greg Mulkey recalled seeing the district's memo, they said Yost's recommended hygiene practices already are in place. Towels are washed after each practice and the kids themselves disinfect the mats twice daily.

Coos Bay is lucky in that there are nurses at every school. Blossom Gulch Elementary School nurse Angie Webster said they all visit classes and work with children on good hygiene and knowing when to stay home from school when sick.

Webster also teaches children about germs - that you can't see them, but they're there. She goes as far as swabbing door knobs and noses, and then growing the bacteria to show kids the potential.

And for all the talks about staying healthy and really scrubbing their hands as long as it takes to say the alphabet, she knows those grade-schoolers get the message.

“You'll hear them in the bathroom singing the ABC song,” she said.

But Yost is encouraging coaches and school nurses to go a step further and do a better job tending to skin breaks.

“Watch out for signs of infections,” Yost said. “And encourage kids to tell people when it's getting red and hot and looking like a pimple instead of a cut or scrape.”

That's when it's time to check in with the doctor.

Bug science

Bacteria live on people's skin. It's up their noses.

The staph bug tends to set up little microscopic colonies on up to a third of all humans, according to a communicable disease summary from the state health officials. It just waits for a chance to get in - through a skin puncture or maybe someone's immune system is weakened.

White blood cells in a healthy person usually gobble them up. But not always.

Staph bacteria are tiny. They invade cells. Figure a microscopic red blood cell measures 7 microns. A bacterium is less than 1 micron.

MRSA gets in and starts replicating. When it does, at some point those patients end up at doctors' offices or Bay Area Hospital.

There, a real Dr. Science, Don Finn, is waiting.

“I'm just the bug person,” explained Finn. He's the microbiology supervisor in the hospital laboratory who tracks each case and analyzes fluid and swab samples for MRSA. Even though MRSA is considered antibiotic resistant, there are some classes of drugs that destroy it. It's his job, within about 24 hours, to figure out which drug will kill the bacteria.

But a conversation with Finn is about more than identifying killer drugs. It's about the basic principles of life.

“Antibiotics started out as natural products the bacteria were using against each other,” he said.

Penicillin, the wonder drug developed in 1940, was derived from bacterial mold. And soon, bacteria were developing resistance to it. They had to, to survive.

An antibiotic is a molecule that looks like a component of a cell wall, Finn said. A cell picks it up and the antibiotic makes the cell wall leaky, killing it, so the bacteria is essentially faulty.

Scientists have gone on tinkering with antibiotics trying to stay a leap ahead of the bugs, which are trying to stay a step ahead of competing bugs. Even if humans weren't in the battle at all, bacteria still would be evolving, developing antibiotic resistance to each other.

“It's kind of like war,” Finn said.

Fear vs. education

One key to winning the war, say health care workers, is being educated about prevention.

When people don't understand the causes of disease or infection, they get scared.

MRSA isn't the case where a “Killer Bug Ate My Face.” That tabloid newspaper headline in the United Kingdom in the mid-1990s created a scare over skin-necrotizing bacteria that still has people panicking.

MRSA is not flesh-eating bacteria.

“Flesh-eating bacteria ... is caused by a completely different organism,” Dr. Yost said.

He was referring to a kind of streptococcus - but NOT the kind of strep that causes strep throat. The pediatrician said that strain has never been seen in children in this community - not ever.

Methicillin, the family of drugs to which staph bacteria have become increasingly resistant, was invented in 1960. By 1961, scientists found bacteria surviving it.

Part of the blame lies with people who don't finish their antibiotic series prescribed by doctors.

Think of it this way, Finn said: When antibiotics are dumped into a person's system, if one bacteria survives, it quickly replicates. One bacterium quickly becomes billions of bacteria with that new resistance.

For the future, researchers are trying to find new ways to fight antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Finn said there are fascinating experiments out there that are trying to design tiny viruses to attack specific types of bacteria.

There also is work being done on a vaccine to protect people against MRSA, said Coos County Public Health Officer Charles Holloway, M.D.

“It's being tested in dialysis patients and it works,” he said.

It hasn't been approved by the FDA and there's debate whether the vaccine really would work long-term. That may be the answer if the community-acquired MRSA becomes more prevalent, he added.

In the end, though, health workers say it's basic common sense that will slow MRSA's spread among healthy people in the community.

And the first line of defense is to wash those hands.

- City Editor Elise Hamner can be reached by calling 269-1222 ext. 239 or by e-mailing ehamner@theworldlink.com.