Poor man *shakes head*

Its such bad luck - none of these things would ever happen to Sting would they?

Hope Springs Etermal Prole, Hope Springs Eternal.

this seems to be happening with alarming regularity - sort it out Bliar!

does anyone NOT catch MRSA after a prolonged hospital stay?

get well soon, mr collins.

me on seeing this:

"Please be Phil, Please be Phil...ah shite!"

damn Tory cleaning...

woah. thats really surprising. such animosity towards Phil Collins. you should be ashamed of yourselves.









I thought exactly the same thing.

Are you thinking what we're thinking?

for fuck's sake it's not a virus

woah. he's had to deal with a lot. Get well soon, Edwyn.

I've never met a nurse like you before...

Firstly MRSA is a BACTERIA not a virus as kicka11 said.

And the evolution of MRSA, an antibiotic resistant strain of a bacteria about a third of us carry in the back of our throats, mostly harmlessly, has taken many years. Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics through their overuse, partly to all the people who insist on antibiotics for every sore throat/cold etc, and also now largely thought to be due to the use of massive doses of antibiotics routinely given to intensively farmed animals to allow them to be kept in more cramped, dirtier conditions without them becoming sick.

MRSA began spreading under the Tories. The underfunded NHS under the tories was also forced to contract out its hospital cleaning to private companies to save a bit of cash so Thatcher et al could bribe people with tax cuts to vote for them again. Because hospitals were forced to accept the lowest bid, rather than the best one, the companies did, and still do, pay their staff a pittance and do as little actual cleaning as they can get away with to maximise their profits, would be very small if they cleaned everything properly.

So just as cleaners in banks are made to work night shifts for minimum wage while the chief execs walk away with 10 or 11 million a year, cleaners in hospitals are poorly paid and expected to clean a lot of areas in minimum time, things get missed, there are plenty of places for bacteria to breed, etc.

So you may want to think about thanking the lovely Conservative party for starting it all. Not Blair, despite his multitude of other faults.

And stop buying factory farmed meat while you're at it, it's cruel and wrong.

while we're on the subject. MRSA is just one of several "superbugs" that people are coming down with in hospital (pseudomonas is another naturally occuring bacteria that gets out of control). I don't know why the media has been too thick to pick up on this. When they talk about number of deaths from MRSA I wonder if it is just MRSA or if it includes all "superbug" deaths. Numbers are not reported properly though. I know of several deaths that have not been put down to infection in hospital even though that was what finally killed someone off.