Tips About Bacterial Skin Infections and MRSA

As you probably know, the summer heat and humidity is associated with an increased incidence of bacterial skin infections. These conditions most commonly show up as infected hair follicles with pimple or pustule like changes known as folliculitis and painful swollen nodules or lumps which represent boils.

If you are an individual who spends time working outdoors or have an occupation associated with exposure to heat and occlusion, then you can be more prone to develop these types of infections.

Depending upon the area of your body involved, you could experience one or more tender red bumps or nodules on the back, chest, shoulders or thighs. However, since occlusion along with the heat aggravates this problem, the buttocks are an area of frequent involvement. If your work requires wearing a hard hat or helmet then the occlusion and heat in this area can cause the scalp to become involved.

Many times these infections are transient causing temporary symptoms of pain or irritation, clearing up spontaneously with a change of exposure to a cooler less humid environment. In other cases, the problem can be more severe causing you to experience stubborn persistent skin nodules and areas of ulceration that continue to develop for weeks and months.

On other occasions, the areas of skin infection develop into large swollen hardened areas of redness which represents a condition called cellulitis. When this happens you might also find yourself experiencing chills, fever, or elevation of body temperature.

So, what should you do if you notice the presence of skin lesions that you think are related to bacterial infection? The most common step that you might take is to use over the counter triple antibiotic ointment to see if it works. In some cases this might help you, but in others, it might not. When your over the counter topical antibiotics don’t work, it’s a good idea for you to see your family physician or a dermatologist.

Most of the persistent skin infections are due to either staph aureus or streptococcal infections; however other organisms are sometimes identified. Usually these infections readily clear with oral or topical antibiotic medication. If you have a high body temperature or systemic symptoms, then you could require intramuscular or intravenous antibiotics to treat the infection. However, there is one type of bacteria that is highly contagious and does not respond to regular antibiotic therapy.

This organism is known as Methicillin Resistant Staph infections (MRSA) and has been in the news recently because of a recent report from the Mayo Clinic that there were more deaths in the USA from MRSA infections (>19,000) than from AIDS when the 2010 statistics were reviewed. Most of the infections with this type of organism were acquired in the hospital but they have also been acquired outside of the hospital, or community acquired. It has been estimated that close to 2,300,000 people in the United States are carriers for MRSA infections which means that they are colonized with MRSA and can transmit the condition to others even if they themselves do not have an active infection.

Even though this condition was originally primarily a hospital related problem, many individuals acquire the condition in the community without prior hospitalization. Most of the stubborn skin infections due to MRSA have been coming and going for months without clearing up completely. On one occasion, I treated an individual who subsequently had 9 neighbors infected on the same street including a father and a son who both had to be hospitalized for IV antibiotics because of the severity of the infection. In this case, the infection spread between the various houses in the neighborhood because the children played with each other and went from house to house causing the infection to spread.

So, if you find yourself getting boils that are skin infections that just won’t go away and linger for weeks and weeks or months and months, you may need to have a culture done to check for a resistant MRSA infection. If the organism is identified then it is important to get proper treatment so that you can heal as well as prevent you from becoming a long term carrier and spreading the disease to others.