Could a Commonly Prescribed Antibiotic Worsen MRSA Infections?

MRSA infections were made worse by antibiotics in mice that were part of the latest study.

The study was conducted by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA, and is published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), MRSA can cause skin and other infections within the community. In a hospital, however, it can cause severe problems such as bloodstream infections, pneumonia and surgical site infections.

Though anybody can get a MRSA infection through direct contact with an infected wound or by sharing personal items that have come in contact with infected skin, people who are in places that involve crowding or skin-to-skin contact are at greater risk.

Examples of such people include athletes, daycare and school kids, military personnel living in barracks and inpatients at hospitals. According to CDC data from 2011, MRSA causes over 80,000 invasive infections and 11,000 related deaths per year.

Beta-lactams made mice with MRSA infections sicker

Given the scale of the MRSA threat, the research team wanted to investigate what makes MRSA so pathogenic. They say though many studies have established that MRSA infections cause more severe diseases compared with normal staph infections, the reason has been unclear.

They found that in laboratory mice, treatment with antibiotics called beta-lactams - which are similar to methicillin - caused the MRSA bacteria to build inflammatory cell walls that damage tissues. Beta-lactam antibiotics kill normal staph by neutralizing their enzymes that make cell walls.

However, the researchers found that one of these enzymes - called PBP2A - is not neutralized by the antibiotics. Furthermore, PBP2A actually enables the superbug to continue building its cell wall.

They also found that the cell wall's structure is different from normal staph, which allows the superbug to proliferate.

The researchers say their take-home message from all of this is that, after introducing the antibiotics to the MRSA-infected mice, they became even sicker.

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