A New ‘Gay Disease’?

Awareness of the symptoms of a potentially serious bacterial infection can help contain the spread. Experts note that this, and other community-associated forms of MRSA, generally begin as a pimplelike sore that looks like a spider bite and starts to get bigger. "Someone says, 'I think I've got a spider bite'," says Dr. Gary Noskin, an infectious disease specialist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Typically, it's "localized" and remains in a specific area of the body. Noskin has seen some infections the size of a dime and some that are five to six inches. Doctors typically give patients antibiotics and lance their boil.

Infections are more likely to occur if there is some opening in the skin, such as from a shaving nick or a needle puncture, that breaks the body's "protective barrier," says Noskin. "Direct contact with an open wound would increase the likelihood."

As with other forms of staph, doctors recommend hand washing and showers as ways of preventing infection. This regime could be particularly important for those that were identified by the study as vulnerable to USA300. "We want gay men to be aware of the risk, we want them to know this can easily be prevented through good hygiene and cleanliness," says GMHC's Stackhouse. "It's cold and flu season. We should all be washing our hands."

Those who do get infected with USA300 are commonly treated with the antibiotic Bactrim (trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole), which is still effective against the infection. But if that doesn't work, or a patient is allergic, doctors may have to resort to other antibiotics, many of them intravenous and expensive. Typically, patients need five or six days of treatment. 

The current challenge with any kind of MRSA is to get more information about the way the infection behaves in the community. "We don't really understand the dynamics of acquisition or resistance or the dynamics of spread," says Chambers. For the immediate future, Chambers believes most community-associated MRSA infections will be treatable with medication. (Community and hospital-acquired MRSA were responsible for 94,000 life-threatening infections and 18,650 deaths in 2005, according to the Centers for Disease Control).

The bottom line is that Americans don't need to worry that every kid in their school, or every gay man they know, will come down with the infection. "It's not like it's a scourge, like measles," says Chambers. A viral disease, measles infects basically everyone who hasn't had it or been vaccinated against it. Even in San Francisco's Castro district, only one in 588 people is carrying this variant of MRSA, the study estimates. That compares with 1 in 3,800 people in the overall city of San Francisco.