We’ll kick off with those news items with a look at bed bugs. Da-da-da.  Yeah, I know Bed bugs.  You know they are pests, they’re a pain.  In the past though we’ve talked about it here and maybe more so over at The Nursing Show and my Insights at Nursing panel show talking about what does it really mean bed bugs getting in the hospitals and ambulances and into your own home.  Because ‘till to date they have not been seen to be a vector for any kind of disease and of course that’s the big problem with things like mosquitos and other animals and insects and other animals that might get be getting into places and infesting them is that they can be vectors for disease.  For you know carrying one disease between humans as they bite one person and go on with the next person.

To date there has been no sign that bed bugs are indeed vectors for anything.  And that’s a good news item because they’re really hard to get rid of.  But a recent article that I found over at webMD.com maybe in sighting some panic among some people about bed bugs.  Because “Do bed bugs spread MRSA?”  Is the headline.  Well do they?  Well, no.  There’s no evidence that bed bugs spread MRSA but when they look at a few of their recent home lists who had been pick up and brought in the emergency room for medical issues and they found bed bugs on them.   Somebody thought it will be good idea to go ahead and test the bed bugs to see if they have any diseases on them like infections.  The insects live on and around the skin and certain times of the life cycle before they leave to go hide in the area.  They only come out to feed occasionally. But when they are on you, if they had something like MRSA on them could bite you and leave you with a skin infection.  It makes sense right? Well maybe, maybe not.  What indeed found was they did find medication resistance to bacteria on these bed bugs that were found on these couple of homeless people that came in.  This isn’t a huge population if your statistics person the N is almost the small as it can get.  You know 2 or 3 homeless people do not a large sample size make in any case but it is notable that there were detectable signs of this bacteria.  Now this bacteria lives out there in the wild.  Yes, there’s hospital  and healthcare’s acquired versions of these super bugs but  the community acquired versions are almost as bad as many cases and much more prevalent and were seeing increases of it.  My question of course would be did the bed bugs give the homeless guys MRSA?  Or did the homeless guys give the bed bugs MRSA?  In other words, did the bed bugs have this on them when they got there?  Or did it get transferred to them as they are rubbing up against the skin while they were there?  And can they — could they transfer to someone else?

So it’s hard to say but certainly were getting this from the community in some way whether it’s in living you know to on surface we touch and you know whatever the case maybe.  So be aware of this and make sure that you are just reading headlines carefully.  If you see some headline asking a question like that “Do bed bugs spread MRSA?”  If the bed bugs were found to spread MERSA it would say “Bed bugs spread MERSA”. That would be a much more compelling headline.  So if it’s asking the question it probably it’s not something to be off to worry about.  Read the article, educate yourself but don’t be one of those people who runs out sees the medical headline and thinks he know everything about the article.  Often these headlines are very misleading and can lead you down the path that can be dangerous.  We all have patients that had heard the recent news headline just somebody spread the word to the mind they read the headline didn’t read the article and they thing they know everything about a certain problem and they stop taking their meds.  We’ve seen that patient time and again.  We need to be again on the front lines because we are there anyway of educating these patients about what’s going on medically in the community.  Just educate yourself.  You don’t have to be super knowledgeable about every little study that came down the fight but of something that makes mainstream news take the time and look over the article so you can talk intelligently about it and educate people during that trip to the hospital.

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This article has been featured in the news segment of the MedicCast podcast episode NREMT Cardiac Skills Part 2 and Episode 267