BLOOMINGTON - Reduce your risk of getting sick from germs without obsessing over microbes.

That's the message from several Central Illinois experts on infectious disease.

Use good hygiene practices to try to keep at bay everything from the common cold to influenza and MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). But unless you have a compromised immune system, are elderly or have an infant with you, don't let concerns over disease-causing microbes keep you from getting out and doing your daily activities.

"Places that have a lot of traffic have more germs: public stair rails, escalator handrails, buttons in elevators," said Laura Vogel, associate professor of immunology at Illinois State University. "But we don't want to get to the point where we get so paranoid that we don't want to touch anything in public."

Concern over antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as MRSA has risen in recent years with an increase in cases nationally and locally. While the diseases are seldom fatal, they are easily transmitted by skin-to-skin contact, or contact with someone's personal items, and may lead to serious illness that destroys skin and gets into the bloodstream.

Each month, BroMenn Regional Medical Center staff treats 15 to 20 patients with MRSA, said Pam Bierbaum, infection control practitioner and registered nurse. At OSF St. Joseph Medical Center, the average is about 9 to 11 patients a month, said Sarah Dick, infection control nurse.

Since last fall, the number of MRSA patients at BroMenn has stabilized, and the number at St. Joseph may be up only slightly. But both hospitals have more patients in isolation.

The reason is improved screening for MRSA has identified people who are carriers of the disease but aren't necessarily sick with it, Bierbaum and Dick said. They are kept in isolation to prevent them from spreading the disease to other, sicker patients who may not be able to fight off the organism.

"Typically, we have several patients in isolation every day from MRSA," Bierbaum said. Screening of all intensive care unit patients and all high-risk patients (such as people admitted from nursing homes and dialysis patients) has identified some MRSA carriers who perhaps would not have been identified several years ago.

"We have more patients in isolation, but that's true of most hospitals," Bierbaum said.

Isolation means those patients are in a private room and that nurses wear a gown, gloves and a mask when treating the patient.

"Isolation used to be the exception; now it's the norm," Dick said. She questions whether hospitals will be able to keep up that level of intensity and whether it is necessary. She questions whether hospitals next should focus less on isolation and instead redouble efforts to keep "high-touch surfaces" clean.

The increase in cases of MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria does not mean there are more disease-causing microbes (microorganisms) in the world.

"There have always been microbes," Dick said.

"There are microbes all around you every day, on every surface you touch, on foods you eat, in your body," said Vogel, who has graduate degrees in microbiology and immunology and focuses on how the body protects itself from disease.

"But they don't cause any harm in a normally healthy person. The immune system will take care of it. A person with a compromised immune system may not do as well.

"Most of the microbes around you don't cause risk," Vogel continued. "Most of the microbes aren't pathogens (a microorganism that produces disease)."

But that small percentage that cause disease are causing a bigger problem.

"We are seeing more of them in the patient population because they are resistant to a broader array of antibiotics." With overuse of antibiotics, more microbes have adapted and mutated to become resistant to certain antibiotics that would have treated them before.

"It's not the number, it's the type of microbe," Bierbaum said. "It's a little meaner."

"Pathogens are sort of sexually promiscuous," Dick said. "They get around. They breed resistance. We all want to be stronger, hardier and a pathogen can take what it needs from other bacteria."

For that reason, doctors are trying to order antibiotics only for patients who need to fight bacteria, not a virus, such as a cold. In addition, doctors are trying to prescribe the antibiotic "with the narrowest spectrum of kill - to use the minimum amount to get the job done," Bierbaum said.

Living in close quarters, having skin-to-skin contact, sharing contaminated items, not practicing good hygiene and leaving wounds uncovered increase the risk of infection, Vogel said.

Paul Swiech can be reached at pswiech@pantagraph.com.