William Atkins
Sunday, 13 September 2009 19:23
Science -
Health
Page 2 of 3
Dr. Roberts, a co-author of a study that analyzed beach water and sand for MRSA, reported her findings during a Saturday, September 12, 2009 press conference at the 49th annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agency and Chemotherapy (
ICAAC).
The ICAAC meeting, held September 12-15, 2009, in San Francisco, California (U.S.A.), is highlighting infectious diseases.
MRSA was found on five of ten public beaches that were analyzed along the coast of Washington and California between the months of February and September in 2008.
The MRSA stain was found only in Washington, not California, but such results do not rule out that the resistant germ is not already present in the California beaches, too.
Staphylococcus aureus (
S. aureus), the ordinary strain, was found on nine out of the ten beaches (including one of the two California beaches studied). All of the strains were found more frequently in the sand than in the water.
Because the MRSA strain was found on public beaches, the researchers state that such a finding could make it much more difficult for the medical community to contain the bacterium, and thus making the germ much easier to spread among humans.
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