Norwich - In trying to “sanitize the planet,” humans are instead ushering in a world more flush with highly infectious bacteria including methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, according to a doctor who spoke at The William W. Backus Hospital last week.

The mechanism of this foolhardy attempt to sterilize our bodies, homes and gathering places: overused antibiotics in human medicine and in animal feed, and the more than 700 soaps, household cleansers and hygiene products found on pharmacy and grocery store shelves that contain antibacterial agents.

”All we've done is select out the more difficult pathogens,” said Dr. Richard Quintiliani, professor of pharmacology and medicine at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, in a talk at The William W. Backus Hospital Thursday. “Most germs are really good germs. There is a misconception that the only good germ is a dead germ. Most are helpful. They're the best protection you have against disease.”

He noted that the average person is composed of 10 trillion human cells and about 100 trillion germ cells, most of them essential for proper digestion, nutrition, disease resistance and overall good health. But too often, these beneficial bacteria are killed off by overzealous practices and the vacuum is filled by the nasty kind.

The American Medical Association and its affiliate, the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, have issued a statement that there are “no health benefits” to the use of antibacterial products, he noted, and that their use may negatively change a household environment and the immune systems of its residents to make them more susceptible to infections from MRSA and other highly contagious and dangerous bacteria.

Benefits of restraint

He recommended that children younger than a year old not be given antibiotics except for serious conditions when there is no alternative, and said studies have shown that children who do have antibiotics in their first 12 months have higher rates of allergies, asthma and autoimmune diseases.

”Their immune system gets messed up. It never develops properly,” he said. “The average person should really only take antibiotics three or four times in their lifetime.”

Countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden that have historically practiced the greatest restraint in the use of antibiotics, he added, have the lowest MRSA rates worldwide.

Dr. Quintiliani, a Norwich native whose father practiced family medicine in the city for many years, tackled the topic of MRSA infections, a growing concern in hospitals, residential institutions like prisons, and among athletes and other groups for an audience of about 25 Backus nurses, doctors and other health care workers.

He noted that in hospitals across the country, an average of 49 percent of the staph infections in intensive care units are MRSA. At Backus, he learned, the rate is 15 percent. MRSA caused 20,000 deaths in 2005, more than those who died of AIDS that year, and was responsible for 94,340 serious infections.

”Increasingly,” he said, “cases are coming from the community” rather than being contracted in hospitals, as had been more common. Treating the disease is difficult because it is resistant to first-line antibiotics and it is often accompanied by other infections, he said, but there are still antibiotics and treatments available to arrest it in most cases. He showed a slide of a patient with a hip and upper leg horribly diseased by MRSA and an opportunistic infection. Despite aggressive surgery and drug therapy, the patient died.

Penicillin's side-effect

While staph infections have afflicted mankind since ancient times, he noted, this highly potent strain didn't emerge until 1951. It evolved in response to the commercial development of penicillin when it picked up a gene from another bacteria that made its cell membrane impenetrable to the antibiotic. By 1953, the so-called semi-synthetic family of antibiotics was developed that was effective against most staph infections through the 1960s. MRSA began emerging in the United States in the late 1960s, and infections from MRSA have increased exponentially since then.

About 15 to 35 percent of normal, healthy people are MRSA carriers, he said, harboring the germ in their noses and other body cavities, and that health care workers, including surgeons, are more often carriers than others. Carriers do not become ill with the infection themselves but can pass it to others.

”But don't go looking for them,” he said. “Leave them alone. You can't outfox these organisms. If you try, a more resistant one will emerge.”

Regular, thorough hand washing with plain soap and other good hygiene practices coupled with very limited use of antibiotics and no use of antibacterials is the best way to protect yourself from the disease, he said.

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