Organisms Commons^™

Staphylococcus Aureus May Be Living In Your Nasal Cavity Right Now, Hannah Pedersen

Research and Scholarship Symposium Posters

Staphylococcus aureus is a dual role bacterium and is able to live commensally in some patients, but can cause disease in others. Methicillin resistant S. aureus (MRSA) causes life threatening disease in patients and can be very hard to treat since it is resistant to many antibiotics. In order for S. aureus to wreak havoc on the body, it must be able to have specific genes expressed to secrete toxins. These toxins are what causes the patients to get a wide variety of symptoms like boils, scalded skin, toxic shock syndrome, pneumonia or sepsis. This study tested eleven different isolates …