Bringing MRSA Back to the Forefront

A slip on black ice caused Jeanine Thomas to break her ankle badly enough to require surgery. While in the hospital, she subsequently contracted osteomyelitis from MRSA and she went into septic shock. She overcame the sepsis, but was given cocktails of antibiotics to combat the MRSA and contracted C diff. Thomas explains she was “very sick” for almost 5 years.

She began to think about MRSA more widely during her battle, especially after her physicians didn’t initially explain what she had. Eventually, they told her she had a staph infection and after further inquiries with people in her local area in Illinois, she realized the problem was much larger than previously thought. This limited information bothered her and she felt like she needed to shine more of a light on it.

“I contacted my state rep and state senator and said, ‘look, there’s something going on here. Nobody’s talking about it in healthcare industry, and my friends and family are getting it.’ They had not heard anything about it, so they started looking into it with the department of public health, and then they realized what was going on, that this was a secret and silent killer. It had been for decades, so that’s what really started it,” Thomas said.

Making MRSA Reportable, Collecting Data

She founded MRSA Survivors Network in early 2003 to raise awareness and develop education around it. “ I started my organization, because I said nobody helped me when I was really sick. It was very isolating. And I said, ‘I’ve got to raise awareness, because I know there’s a lot of people out there, throughout the US and globally, who have this disease, and they’re not being helped,’” Thomas said.

Early on in the network’s infancy, Thomas began working with her state’s legislators in Illinois. She saw the need to get more reportable MRSA information to all stakeholders. “We have to know the magnitude of this ongoing epidemic,” Thomas explained.

She worked with then Illinois State Senator Barack Obama to pass the Hospital Report Card Act that mandated infections and patient/nurse ratios be publicly reported. It passed in 2003. She advocated for and was involved in the passage of the MRSA Screening and Reporting Act in the state, which mandated screening for MRSA in all Illinois hospitals for ICU and at-risk patients and mandated MRSA infection rate reporting.

The bill passed and was signed into law by the governor in August 2007, making Illinois the first state to pass and enact mandated screening in the United States. Other states have since passed similar legislation.

“Here in Illinois all at-risk patients are screened upon admission…and if it’s a contributing cause or specific cause of death, it has to be put on the death certificates,” Thomas said. “It became a reportable disease because we were not getting the data [previously]. And if you don’t get the data, you don’t get the funding for research. We really needed to get funding to get new therapies and bring it to forefront,” Thomas said.

Thomas also works on a federal level with her US congress members on MRSA, healthcare-acquired infections, and antibiotic resistant bacteria issues and has worked on 3 federal bills for mandated MRSA screening and reporting.