By Carter Thompson
The Galveston Daily News
Published 12/08/03

In 2000, county jailers launched a full-scale assault against brown recluse spiders, sending specialists into the jail’s ducts, crawl spaces and pipe chases to kill the elusive and unwelcome guests.

But public health authorities now believe the spiders were wrongly accused of a crime committed by an even smaller bug.

A strain of the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as staph, immune to the most effective antibiotics now available, has become increasingly prevalent.

It’s known as MRSA and it’s been showing up in greater frequency at day care centers, high school athletic programs and other places where people can come into close contact with a carrier.

Staph infections are nothing exotic and, in fact, are the leading cause of pimples, said Dr. C. Glen Mayhall, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Texas Medical Branch and epidemiologists for its hospitals and clinics in Galveston County.

Any staph infection can prevent a wound from healing and, if it gets into the bloodstream, can cause abscesses in organs and endocarditis, the infection of the inner walls of the heart and its valves, he said.

Hospitals have long had to be watchful for staph outbreaks, and the resistant strain began showing up in the 1970s, Mayhall said. In the past 10 years, it has become increasingly common, both in and out of hospitals.

MRSA now accounts for about 60 percent of the infections seen in hospitals, he said. There were three, soon to be four, antibiotics able to beat back MRSA infections, Mayhall said.

“We’ve just sort of watched this thing build as we have tried to control it. It’s getting to be so prevalent,” he said, explaining that detecting and handling those carrying the bacteria were difficult. "You can’t isolate half the people in the hospital and can’t culture people walking in the door.”

The misdiagnosis, if there was one, in the county jail was understandable. The Centers for Disease Control say that MRSA infections often are mistaken for spider bites.

Infections are difficult to track because staph infections were not on the list of diseases and conditions that must be reported to state health authorities.

But several cases suspected to have been MRSA have come to the attention of public health authorities in Galveston County, said Chuck Chambers, epidemiologist with the county health district. All the victims recovered.

When dozens of jail inmates complained of being bitten, the sheriff’s office first tried insecticides and then turned to exterminators who used hair spray that was said to suffocate spiders.

Maj. Mike Henson, the jail’s commander, said none of the spiders he ever saw in the jail were brown recluses, and the spider expert hired by the county determined they were not the cause of the lesions that showed up on inmates.

Efforts to determine the cause were frustrated by the inmates’ delays in seeking treatment, Henson said. Chambers said the signs pointed to the antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria.

“That was probably erroneous,” he said of the diagnosis. “There probably wasn’t a spider problem. It was probably MRSA going around.”

Several football players on the mainland also showed up with lesions that appear to have been MRSA, Chambers said. Some came from Santa Fe and others were students from League City. Officials from Santa Fe and Clear Creek Independent School District did not return calls seeking more information.

Mayhall said UTMB already had procedures to prevent the spread of MRSA, isolate patients carrying it and notify places like nursing homes where patients might go after being discharged.

The university was working on additional programs to counter the increasing prevalence of MRSA. The program included taking surveillance cultures from high-risk patients and isolating them if the bacteria was found.

The hospital also was considering trying to kill the bacteria in its favorite place on the human body to colonize — the nostrils, he said.

For further information, contact
Kurt Koopmann
Public Information Officer
(409) 938-2211
kkoopman@gchd.org