MRSA, Homeless Issues Highlight Borough Cabinet
BY THOMAS COGAN

Happy New Year exchanges marked the beginning of the first Queens Borough Cabinet meeting of 2008, and then Borough President Helen Marshall led the cabinet efficiently through four items. The first of them addressed the MRSA health issue, in an attempt to allay fears that a plague of deadly infection could be circulating. The other items were about heat and hot water complaints, the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) and the Queens Preparedness Conference for Faith.

MRSA stands for methicillin resistant Staphlococcus aureus, or resistant Staph. Because of at least one death from the infection recently, and because that victim was a child, fear of an uncontrollable disease endangering children has arisen and been publicized. At the meeting, Melissa A. Marx, identifying herself as a career epidemiology field officer of the Centers for Disease Control and working for the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, said that while the Brooklyn child's death was sad, there is no indication that many such deaths will follow. Staph, she said, is present on the skin or in the nasal passages of perhaps one person in five and is not normally toxic. Additionally, perhaps 1 percent of those persons carry MRSA, the resistant Staph, with no ill effects, Marx noted. Staph, she said, adapts and eventually can become resistant to treatments designed to kill it. Penicillin-resistant Staph was first noticed in the 1960s, the methicillin-resistant kind in the 1980s- so MRSA has been around for more than 20 years, and indeed, was responsible for the deaths of four children in the Midwest in a 1990s occurrence, she said. Resistant Staph infections have long been a problem in hospitals, but the current concern is mainly for communityassociated MRSA (CA-MRSA), of which the Brooklyn incident was an example. CA-MRSA might be spreading, but in fact the picture in New York is not clear at present, Marx said.

Through a PowerPoint presentation she explained that MRSA infections can emerge on the skin looking like pimples or boils. Infections are contracted by skinto skin contact involving at least one infected party. They can usually be treated by simply cleaning and covering the infected area. An antibiotic regimen is necessary if fever is present and infection persists. What is paramount, Marx said, is cleanliness, of body and furniture surfaces. Don't touch infected areas, Marx said, and don't share personal items such as towels and razors.

There might have been a long question period accompanying Dr. Marx's presentation, but Marshall was determined to move the meeting along, and the epidemiologist soon yielded to a housing official. Mario Ferrigno, assistant commissioner, Department of Housing Preservation and Development, talked about the procedure for resolving heat and hot water complaints. He said that from the beginning of the heating season in October until the end of December, 472 heat-related violation citations were issued in Queens.

This year's Homeless Outreach Population Estimate takes place Monday night and early Tuesday morning, January 28 and 29, beginning at 10:30 p.m. and running to 4 a.m. Jay Bainbridge, an assistant commissioner for policy and research at the Department of Homeless Services, said the department seeks volunteers to canvass streets, parks and subway stations and trains, identifying and interviewing the homeless persons they find. In Queens, more than 200 areas will be covered, including 28 subway stations. The aim is to get the homeless off the streets and into shelters. Bainbridge said that such tracking of the homeless has helped reduce street homelessness in Queens by 44 percent since 2005.

The last item was the Queens Preparedness Conference for Faith Leaders, whose spokesman was Calder Yates, an interfaith outreach coordinator from the Office of Emergency Management. This is to be an all-day event held some time in March, though at the moment an exact date has not been set. Its purpose is to connect faith leaders with elected officials and disaster organizations such as the city Office of Emergency Management to prepare plans of action for the time when natural forces or political enemies inflict a serious blow upon New York. Yates used a hurricane as an example, saying that a storm comparable in force to the one in 1938 or the more recent Katrina is certainly coming to New York. The conference should feature scenario exercises, workshops and panel discussions about advance preparations and what to do when the disaster arrives. Yates said that anyone coming to the conference should be prepared to spend all day there.