Spreading Superbug Prompts Gay Plague Hysteria

Feature, By Adrian, 23rd January, 2008

Last week The Australian ran a florid headline – “Flesh-Eating Bug Spreads Among Gays.” The article, which was based on second-hand information gleaned from Britain’s Daily Telegraph, claimed that a “potentially and highly drug-resistant strain of MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) has developed that can lead to a flesh-eating form of pneumonia”.

According to The Australian, “the bug, which is spreading rapidly among homosexual men in several major US cities, can cause boils as large as tennis balls, blood poisoning or a necrotising condition that eats away at the lungs.” The article alleged that “experts… [feared] that promiscuous gay or bisexual men could spread the bug to the general community, mirroring the infection route of the early HIV epidemic of the 1980s.” In San Francisco’s Castro district, “home to the highest concentration of homosexuals in the US,” the article reported that “about one in 588 people [were] carrying the multi-drug-resistant bug.”

When it comes to news reports about issues affecting gay men’s health, it is wise to tread with caution. The genre is rife with sensational stories about miraculous recoveries from AIDS, new HIV superviruses and the like. Stories about new “gay” plagues tend to be the most pernicious of all, because they derive their energy, firstly, by invoking fearmongering comparisons to HIV and, secondly, by suggesting that gay men are directly responsible for threatening to cause a public health crisis.

The Australian’s handling of the MRSA story bore all the hallmarks of gay plague hysteria, giving the impression that a MRSA epidemic spread chiefly through gay sex is imminent.

To be fair, The Australian was not the only paper to overstate the case. Reuters’ headline similarly pressed the link between rapidly-spreading staph infections and gay sex. Amanda Beck opened her article with a flourish, by borrowing from the language of illegal immigration: “A drug-resistant strain of potentially deadly bacteria has moved beyond the borders of U.S. hospitals and is being transmitted among gay men during sex.” Beck makes the bacteria sound like an illicit traveller, guilty of transgressing the regulated “borders” of the U.S. hospital system into the unregulated wilderness of gay sex.

In a New York Times article entitled “New Bacteria Strain Is Striking Gay Men”, Lawrence Altman declared that a “new, highly drug-resistant strain of the ‘flesh-eating’ MRSA bacteria is being spread among gay men in San Francisco and Boston”. Altman claimed that “the bacteria seemed to be spread most easily through anal intercourse”, though he added that it could also be spread “through casual skin-to-skin contact and touching contaminated surfaces.”

How accurate are these reports of a new “gay” strain of MRSA? In fact, the new strain of MRSA now being reported is not new at all. As The Australian acknowledged towards the end of its article, the strain, called USA300, “was first identified in 1999” and “has since become a serious problem, responsible for the majority of admissions for infectious diseases in U.S. hospitals.” Newsweek, in a welcome corrective to most sensational reporting on the story elsewhere, observed that USA300 “has appeared in at least 38 American states among heterosexual and homosexual patients.”

As for the New York Times’ suggestion that the infection spread “most easily through anal intercourse”, the San Francisco study pointedly avoided drawing a direct causal link between specific kinds of sexual activity and the current proliferation of the bacteria. “It is not clear,” the researchers write, “whether the behaviour potentiating these infections among men who have sex with men is anal sex, skin-abrading sexual practices or increased frequency of intimate skin-to-skin contact.” In other words, the San Francisco researchers cannot conclude definitively as to whether USA300 is spread more easily through anal sex or other forms of skin contact.

That’s not to say that no link exists between gay sex and MRSA. The San Francisco study found that men in a clinic for HIV-positive patients who had sex with other men were 13 times more likely than other HIV-positive patients to acquire USA300.

The researchers also observed a high incidence of the infection among gay men who engaged in “high-risk behaviours”. These behaviours included “the use of methamphetamine and other illicit drugs, sex with multiple partners, participation in group sex parties, use of the internet for sexual contacts, skin-abrading sex and history of sexually transmitted infection.”

MRSA can cause severe skin problems, including abscesses and skin ulcers. Unless treated early on, it can produce necrotising fasciitis, which eats away at tissue. Hence the “flesh-eating bacteria” label. It can also lead to pneumonia, heart damage and blood infection. USA300 is of particular concern because it is resistant not only to methicillin but also to many other antibiotics used to treat earlier strains.

The lesson to draw from the current outbreak of MRSA in San Francisco, Boston and other U.S. cities then, is the importance of early prevention. As the New York Times reported, “the San Francisco researchers suggested that scrubbing with soap and water might be the most effective way to stop skin-to-skin transmission, particularly after sexual activities.”

It is a pity that the media was so eager to report on a potential epidemic. Couldn’t more attention have been given to these simple prevention strategies? After all, there is a community out there who have really done with this information.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have since apologised for the homophobic headlines that their initial announcement generated worldwide. They’ve since clarified that while the condition can be contracted through sex, it’s certainly not a sexually transmitted disease in the classical sense.

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