the healthy infected

the last time we had an mrsa outbreak on the floor, i kept staying "i bet it's one of us spreading it".
people laughed: "nah, we're healthy, couldn't be".
but it persisted, despite isolation precautions.
we did point prevalence testing of our patients, and i kept saying "we should be swabbed too, staff should be a part of the point prevalence testing".
people laughed: "nah, we're not patients, we can't get swabbed, we're not patients, we're not allowed to get swabbed"
in 1999, the new england journal of medicine reported a nine-year-old boy in North Dakota whose lungs held unusually deep pockets of tubercule bacilli, infecting his family and fifty-six schoolmates while the boy himself appeared to be in perfect health.*
in 1996, the annals of internal medicine documented the post-surgical intensive care unit of a hospital where an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant staph infections was traced to colonies of Staphylococcus aureus deep in the sinuses of a seemingly healthy medical student.*
asymptomatic, infectious superspreaders.

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*source: Rant: An oral biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk