Although youth in Virginia and New York died from staph infections this year, incidences of the infection in Athens have not been out of the ordinary.
Two groups of outbreaks of antibiotic resistant staph infections were reported to the Athens City-County Health Department in the past year, said Charles Hammer, administrator for the department.
MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, caused the death of a 17 year old in Virginia and a seventh-grader in New York, according to a news release from the office of Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio.
But both incidences of MRSA reported in Athens cleared up with treatment, and no recent cases have been reported,
Hammer said.
While MRSA is resistant to many antibiotics such as methicillin, amoxicillin and penicillin, there are other medications available to treat the infection, he said.
The infection has become resistant to some forms of medication as a result of misuse of antibiotics. If a person does not take the full dosage of an antibiotic prescribed, some bacteria can survive and build immunity to the drug, Hammer said.
The increased misusage of antibiotics over the past years is probably why MRSA has become more common, he said.
MRSA is usually found in hospital settings, but has been reported increasingly in school and community settings. However, no cases of MRSA have been reported to the Athens City School District nurse, Janlee Stock.
Most staph infections are not life threatening, come from a common bacteria and just sit on the skin, Hammer said. They often start out as a pimple or a boil.
A stye (an infection in the eyelid) is a staph infection
Stock said. Are we concerned with a stye? No because they're
