MRSA In Sports: Long-Standing, Simple to Prevent, Still Happening

An ENEMY AT LARGE, MRSA continues to be underestimated through years of rising numbers and severity of cases ravaging athletes and demolishing their sports careers for life. Notably, this lengthy list includes Daniel Fells (New York Giants), Lawrence Tynes (Tampa Bay Buccaneers) and Brandon Noble (Washington Redskins), among many others. In this light, the alarming fact remains that you can be another unknowing target simply through physical contact with infected persons or contaminated objects. Simply put, you can be caught unaware, and the culprit can be anywhere! We at Matguard USA are ON YOUR TEAM in the fight against MRSA, so we’d love for you to know more about this threat before it hits. Start by being informed through the article below.

via National Geographic (http://www.nationalgeographic.com/)

Big news in sports the past few days: Daniel Fells, tight end for the New York Giants, is battling a MRSA infection so severe that he has been hospitalized in isolation and had multiple surgeries. Some news stories have speculated doctors may amputate his foot in an attempt to corral the infection.

It’s a tragic situation for the player, and no doubt frightening for the team, which is reported to have sought medical advice and scrubbed down their locker rooms to prevent any additional cases.

What it’s not, unfortunately, is new. MRSA—the acronym for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, staph bacteria that are resistant to multiple classes of antibiotics—has been dogging sports teams for more than 20 years. And for at least 10 of those years, we’ve known what to do to prevent it. But it’s not at all clear that teams treat that prevention as a routine thing they should be doing—and because of that, every athlete’s infection seems like a random tragedy, instead of an avoidable mistake.