Your Friendly Florida Keys Swimming Buddy – MRSA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor’s Note:  Yeah, it’s truly gross, the photos get worse, and this is not the kind of stuff I enjoy seeing on the home page of The Blue Paper [Thanks Sloan! I was trying to make it attractive.]   But he does have an important message here.   Many of my friends and family members have been infected with MRSA and often its been after getting scraped or injured while playing around offshore.    Take it seriously, avoid swimming with open wounds.       –  Naja Girard

Continue on if you dare…

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What kicked off this delectable discussion was I wrote this to fishing enthusiast and environmentalist Jerry Weinstock, M.D. of Key West:

Hi, Jerry –

After the surgeon carved three nasty MRSA abscesses out of tender areas on my carcass in June 2003, he said I could do anything but go into the ocean.

Divers have told me it is very easy to contract MRSA after getting a nick or scrape in the ocean down here.

Jerry replied:

Sloan –be real careful—a neighbor

here in Key Haven lost his life to

MRSA–(-Resistant Staph A), the cause of

MRSA—-a friend lost his foot

all he had was a nick, —Jerry, M.D.

I wrote back:

After the initial surgery, a new MRSA sore would come up somewhere else on my skin, the antibiotics would get rid of it, then a new MRSA sore would come up somewhere else, the antibiotics would get rid of it. That went on for months. Finally I asked my main doctor, Ian Garriques, a retired infectious disease specialist, if medicine had a cure. He was running the free medical clinic for the City of KW. He said he had talked with doctors all over USA and they had no answer to MRSA. I said that must be really tough on him, a doctors doctor, who had devoted his life to trying to heal people. He looked like he would cry.

That night, I had a dream, which left me feeling I needed to take one day’s dosage only of the new prescription Dr. Garriques had given me that morning, then wait and see what happened. I already had take half a day’s dosage the afternoon before, so I took half a day’s dosage the next morning and stopped taking the prescription. The newest MRSA eruption began to subside, it continued to subside, and in about ten days was gone. No further MRSA sores came.

Some years later, I contracted it again on my skin, but instead of going to a physician, I used a home remedy recommended by a friend: a blend of iodine tincture and Vaseline Petroleum Jelly, and wild oregano oil tincture, applied directly to the eruptions a few times daily. And, I did the writing and speaking given to me to do. That took care of it.

Both times, I knew from dreams the spirit cause of the MRSA infection. Two different heaven-earth ways it was treated.

I now keep handy a small Vaseline plastic jar of pinkish iodine-Vaseline concoction and a bottle of wild oregano oil tincture. I keep the Vaseline-iodine jar tightly sealed out of the light, because air and light destroys iodine’s potency. No bacteria, apparently, is immune to iodine. Whenever I get a nick or scrape, I douse it with hydrogen peroxide, and then I put the pinkish concoction on it. If it persists, I then add the oregano tincture.

Don’t know how it would go with a MRSA infection bigger than, say, a quarter, which was about how large the skin eruption got the second time I was infected. The first time, one of the eruptions [the one on my right buttock] was about the size of a silver dollar. The surgical wound would have held a ping pong ball, maybe even a golf ball. [The other two eruptions, about the size of a quarter, were on either side of the base of my penis.]

Systemic MRSA is something else altogether, although I imagine if it erupts on a person’s skin, it may be systemic shortly afterward. Otherwise, why did it keep coming back on different parts of my body after I contracted it the first time?

Dr. Garriques said it was not systemic, I would be dead if it was. I didn’t agree with him. Maybe he was right for other people, but I was not other people.

During the first MRSA infection, I learned from Dr. Garriques and the surgeon, Michael Klitenick, and his medical partner that MRSA is widespread in mainstream in the Keys, as well as in homeless people. Some years later, I read an article, in The Key West Citizen, as I recall, in which Garriques was quoted as saying MRSA was pandemic in the Keys. He used that word, pandemic.

The Tourist Development Council and the various Chambers of Commerce city and county governments do not warn visitors of the very real chance of contracting MRSA in the Keys, especially after getting a nick or scratch in the sea, and even on land. It is contagious by touch. Klitenick’s medical partner agreed with me, that it might be able to jump from one person to another. MRSA skin eruptions are why some homeless people do not use Key West’s overnight shelter, KOTS. They are afraid of contracting MRSA, which is the terror of all homeless people. That, and brown recluse spider bites, which are even worse than MRSA, the brown recluse skin eruption progresses much faster.

People come to the Keys from somewhere, then they leave and reach home and break out with MRSA, and likely as not have no clue where it was contracted, or how to treat it the way I was taught to treat it by the angels, with some help from one of their human friends.

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Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

See MRSA (disambiguation).

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a bacterium responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans. It is also calledoxacillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (ORSA). MRSA is any strain of Staphylococcus aureus that has developed, through the process of natural selection, resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics, which include the penicillins (methicillin, dicloxacillin, nafcillin, oxacillin, etc.) and the cephalosporins. Strains unable to resist these antibiotics are classified as methicillin-sensitive Staphylococcus aureus, or MSSA. The evolution of such resistance does not cause the organism to be more intrinsically virulent than strains of Staphylococcus aureus that have no antibiotic resistance, but resistance does make MRSA infection more difficult to treat with standard types of antibiotics and thus more dangerous.

MRSA is especially troublesome in hospitals, prisons and nursing homes, where patients with open wounds, invasive devices, and weakened immune systems are at greater risk of infection than the general public.

Advanced MRSA Skin Infections:

Do you think the Key West Chamber of Commerce, the Key West City Government, the Florida Keys Tourist Development Council care about you and anyone you know contracting MRSA?

Yes, there are other causes of ocean pollution in the Keys. Septic systems and cess pits, liveabords dumping raw sewerage into the ocean, road construction and development, Navy ships. However, Key West is completely sewered, and has a state of the art sewerage treatment plant. The city’s treated wastewater is free of biological pathogens. What Key West is not free of is, yep, MRSA in its waters. Same throughout the Florida Keys.

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After posting all of the above at goodmorningkeywest.com a while back, I received an email:

This is REALLY good to know Sloan. I plan to go snorkeling on Saturday the 8th on the Fury. Do you think it’s a bad risk for me too?

GYVEL BERKLEY

Printing, Signs & Designs

I wrote back:

Swimming in most places around Key West probably is okay, if you don’t have a nick or a scratch, such as shaving can cause. Back around 2005, or so, an older friend of mine caught MRSA on his face while swimming in the channel in front of his home on Summerland Key, after shaving that morning. He seemed to get over it with antibiotics, which I felt was fortunate for him. I would take a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide with me on the Fury trip, to apply immediately to any new nick or scratch gotten while in the water. And I would not then go back into the water during that trip, nor later, until the nick or scratch was healed over. Until the scratch was healed over, I would apply the iodine/Vaselinehome remedy 3 times a day. To make the remedy, buy a bottle of the red iodine tincture, not the white iodine. You need to be able to see it, to know when it is mixed into the Vaseline well. Buy a small jar of Vaseline, generic also okay. Scoop out a small amount of the Vaseline with a spoon, and fill the hole with the red iodine. Then, use a steak knife or a tooth pick to jab around in the iodine and Vaseline, until it the two are mixed well, and the concoction is pinkish. Applying undiluted iodine is too caustic, will eat the skin. The Vaseline provides a buffer and works in a time release way, and it keeps the iodine over the nick or scratch, which allows the iodine to be absorbed into the nick or scratch. Same procedure for a progressed open MRSA sore, but do not apply hydrogen peroxide, as it is too caustic for an open MRSA wound. The hydrogen peroxide and iodine and Vaseline altogether might run $10 +- at CVS or Wallgreen’s. I have heard old timers use regular table vinegar on new cuts and scrapes, to head off MRSA infection. Maybe Fury and other dive-snorkel boats give this advice above to their clients. I don’t know. I have never dived or snorkeled in Key West. I have been in the water at Higgs Beach, at Ft. Zachary Taylor State Park, and at Truman Beach on Truman Waterfront. That was many years ago. I do not go in the water now in the Keys, and I do not want to go into the water. If you ever had MRSA, you would know just how truly terrifying it is, and you would not want to do anything to give it another shot at you.

Gyvel replied:

Very good to know! You’re a wealth of information, thanks.

I wrote back:

Hope it helped, hope you have a good day on Fury and no problems afterward. Share with others what I wrote at goodmorningkeywest.com today, and later to you, if you feel inclined. People should know about MRSA down here, even if they don’t want to worry about it. When I wrote of MRSA maybe a year ago on bigpinekey.com’s Coconut Telegraph, which gets more visitors than any blog in the Keys except the who’s been arrested lately page of the Sheriff’s website, I caught a lot of flack and guffaws … until a professional diver wrote in to the CT and told the know it alls, or nots, that I had told the truth about the risk of contracting MRSA in Keys waters; it was well known to divers down here. One fellow had written in to the CT about his horror with MRSA, it was all over him, he didn’t have money for antibiotics, he didn’t know what he was going to do. That’s what caused me to chime in there. I had written about MRSA on the CT some years before that, as well. And, I have written about MRSA on my websites from time to time. Maybe the pretty pictures I used today, starting with the young woman with MRSA on her mouth and chin, and then the young woman with MRSA over her right eye, was more attention getting, prelude to the really awful MRSA photos later in the post.

If such information being make public disagrees with some people, perhaps they should consider, “First do no harm” and

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

“The Hippocratic Oath is an oath historically taken by physicians and other healthcare professionals swearing to practice medicine honestly. It is widely believed to have been written either by Hippocrates, often regarded as the father of western medicine, or by one of his students.[1] The oath is written in Ionic Greek (late 5th century BC),[2] and is usually included in the Hippocratic Corpus. Classical scholar Ludwig Edelstein proposed that the oath was written by Pythagoreans, a theory that has been questioned due to the lack of evidence for a school of Pythagorean medicine.[3] Of historic and traditional value, the oath is considered a rite of passage for practitioners of medicine in many countries, although nowadays the modernized version of the text varies among them.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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