Role in Disease
S. aureus is responsible for many infections but it may also occur as a commensal. The presence of s. aureus does not always indicate infection. S. aureus can survive from hours to weeks, or even months, on dry environmental surfaces, depending on strain.
S. aureus can infect tissues when the skin or mucosal barriers have been breached. This can lead to many different types of infections including furuncles and carbuncles (a collection of furuncles). In infants, S. aureus infection can cause a severe disease - staphylococcal scalded skin syndrome (SSSS).
S. aureus infections can spread through contact with pus from an infected wound, skin-to-skin contact with an infected person by producing hyaluronidase that destroys tissues, and contact with objects such as towels, sheets, clothing, or athletic equipment used by an infected person. Deeply penetrating S. aureus infections can be severe. Prosthetic joints put a person at particular risk of septic arthritis, and staphylococcal endocarditis (infection of the heart valves) and pneumonia. S. aureus can host phages, such as Panton-Valentine leukocidin, that increase its virulence.
Read more about this topic: Staphylococcus Aureus
Famous quotes containing the words role in, role and/or disease:
“Always and everywhere children take an active role in the construction and acquisition of learning and understanding. To learn is a satisfying experience, but also, as the psychologist Nelson Goodman tells us, to understand is to experience desire, drama, and conquest.”
—Carolyn Edwards (20th century)
“The trouble is that the expression ‘material thing’ is functioning already, from the very beginning, simply as a foil for ‘sense-datum’; it is not here given, and is never given, any other role to play, and apart from this consideration it would surely never have occurred to anybody to try to represent as some single kind of things the things which the ordinary man says that he ‘perceives.’”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“His poor self,
A dedicated beggar to the air,
With his disease of all-shunned poverty,
Walks, like contempt, alone.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)