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Melissa Murray regularly ran 10km a day – until a serious bacterial infection nearly cost her a leg.
Last summer, a Toronto woman who worked 60-hour weeks as an account manager suddenly needed round-the-clock care to recover from sepsis. The life-threatening condition is the result of the immune system overreacting to fight infection.
Septic shock deprived Murray’s heart and kidneys of essential blood and oxygen, and his blood pressure dropped dangerously low. To save his life, surgeons had to immediately amputate half of the calf muscle and tendon, plus the inner part of his right upper thigh.
“I kept saying it felt like a campfire in my leg,” Murray, 46, recalled of the “exciting” ordeal in July 2023.
“The pain was so bad that I wanted to get out of my body.”
Murray was one Invasive group A strep (iGAS) Bacterial infection that cannot be treated with standard antibiotics. Doctors don’t know how Murray got the infection, saying it could have been from something as small as a nick in the skin from shaving.
Antibiotic-resistant microbes, sometimes called superbugs, play a major role in sepsis – and may be the greatest international public health threat of our time. World leaders have called antibiotic resistance “an urgent global health threat.” Here’s what patients and doctors say should change.
An urgent global threat
Bacteria live on or within us, often beneficial or harmless. But antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria that can cause infections develop the ability to resist drugs like antibiotics.
World leaders met this week at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Antimicrobial resistance or AMR “an Urgent global health threatAnd it aims to reduce the 4.95 million human deaths associated with it each year by 10 percent by 2030.
As bacteria evolve over time, they can stop responding to antibiotics that once killed them. Then the infection is difficult – and sometimes impossible – to treat.
Sepsis is one of the devastating consequences of antimicrobial resistance. Resistance can render even a minor skin wound incurable or turn routine surgery into an attack by dangerous microbes.
Antimicrobial resistance is “one of the leading causes of death in (all) our countries as we speak, but the worst news is that it will be the No. 1 cause of death by 2050,” said Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley. , the head of the Global Leaders Group on AMR told reporters from the United Nations on Thursday.
Antibiotics are a valuable resource. Bacteria acquire resistance genes from each other. If someone doesn’t take all the antibiotic pills they’ve been prescribed, a bacterium left in the person’s system can develop resistance and quickly take over.
Dr. Alison Fox-Robicaud, scientific director of Sepsis Canada, has witnessed the links between antimicrobial resistance and sepsis in the intensive care unit where she works.
“We can often treat the infection,” said Fox-Robichaud, a professor of medicine at McMaster University. “Sepsis takes longer to treat, the result of that infection. But that means we have fewer antibiotics to use for the serious bacteria that have acquired all these resistance genes.”
Fox-Robicaud said 80 percent of people in Canada are with him. Serious infection are identified in the emergency department, meaning they picked up the microbes in the community where they live. And many more Infection Medicines obtained in intensive care units are resistant to antibiotics, as overuse of drugs results in longer patient stays. Extremely sensitive due to co-morbidities, as well as invasive procedures such as urinary catheter placement.
“It’s disappointing because I know we’ve got vaccine-preventable infections,” Fox-Robichaud said, citing flu and pneumonia as well as RSV in older adults as examples. “I wouldn’t see so many people in my ICU if people took them away.”
‘Like 3 tennis balls under my skin’
For Murray, the iGAS infection initially left him debilitated with vomiting, followed a day later by diarrhea that kept him up all night. His temperature rose to 40°C and persisted throughout the day despite taking antipyretic tablets.
When the sun rose, Murray said her legs felt strangely warm: “It just felt like three tennis balls under my skin,” she said.
Murray called her boyfriend into the living room and they went to the emergency department.
He learned that the warm, balled skin was from cellulitis, a common but potentially serious bacterial skin infection. She said the pain from the infection was “thousands” of times worse than what she had experienced in childbirth.
After 13 days in the hospital, Murray went home with a cocktail of IV antibiotics that doctors dubbed the “Melissa mixture.”
Antibiotics are too blindly prescribed, says the surgeon.
Ara Darzi of Imperial College London is a surgeon who attended the United Nations meeting. He said he wants the world to adopt a new goal by 2030: to diagnose the type of bacteria that is causing an infection before prescribing any antibiotics.
“The supply of new antibiotics has not kept pace with demand,” Darzi said in an email to CBC News. Need to be made available.
“We wouldn’t dream of giving chemotherapy without knowing the type of cancer – why do we tolerate it with infections?”
Thea Turcotte says her life may have been saved by an experimental treatment developed in Winnipeg for her periprosthetic joint infection.
noted Matthew Poirier, assistant professor of social epidemiology at York University in Toronto OppositeMicrobial resistance The bacteria directly caused more than a million deaths in 2021 Globallyfrom common infections like pneumonia to incurable sepsis or tuberculosis.
He said that preventing infection through access to safe water and sanitation, as well as improving vaccination rates, are important measures to prevent antimicrobial resistance.
People in North America and Europe are using antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs at much higher rates, Poirier said. somewhere else In the world: “In many ways we are contributing more to the problem, while not dealing with the worst consequences.”
For Murray, the ongoing consequences of his infection, which occurred a year ago, include patches of sore skin on his shoulder, and a leg that he often has to keep elevated due to swelling. But she can now walk with a cane, and can now drive shorter distances.
“I like to think I’m making progress because I’m alive.”
