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Let’s hear it for Dr Chris Malyszewicz

Aug 10, 2005
5 min read

Photo by kind permission of DarrenS

Recently it’s been impossible to move without headlines about the rise of MRSA in British hospitals. MRSA is a form of Staphylococcus aureus. This is a bug which lives on the skin, but if it gets inside the body it can cause nasty infection. MRSA is methicillin resistant, which means it’s immune to usual antibiotics, which makes it not just nasty but very hard to shift. Ask anyone who has lost a relative to this and they will tell you in no uncertain terms this is a tragedy. These people are understandably angry and vulnerable. They’d be perfect targets for a conman intent on exploiting a terrible situation for personal profit.

So let’s hear a big round of applause for Dr Chris Malyszewicz, one Britain’s leading microbiology experts[1]. Dr Malyszewicz has being waging a crusade against bad hygiene in a bid to defeat MRSA. He does this despite it seeming as though the NHS are out to insult him personally[2]. As he told Wales on Sunday the authorities want to shut him up[3]. Indeed it’s hard not to agree with him. He’s proving to be massively more successful than the authorities in finding and fighting MRSA.

What is it about Dr Malyszewicz, director of Chemsol Consultancy Ltd[4] who sell an MRSA eradicator[5], that makes him such an expert on this deadly killer? Perhaps some people simply know what they’re talking about. There can be little doubt that he is an expert. He can find MRSA where no-one else can.

He found it in University College London Hospital. When the hospital did their own checks they found nothing. They tried to find out how Dr Malyszewicz did, but they ran into a snag. Chemsol don’t keep a lot of written records. A Department of Health report, courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, states: “No hard copy of results of the hospital environmental tests or of the Quality Control data linked to the identification of the isolates as MRSA…He has not kept any of his putative MRSA isolates for confirmation and further testing at a reference laboratory or by other microbiologists.” It seems the only evidence MRSA was ever in University College London Hospital is Dr Malyszewicz’s word, but that’s good enough for me[6].

He also found it a number of other London hospitals[7]. When the local health trust sent their ‘experts’ they found nothing[8]. The same thing happened in Scotland. Once again he found MRSA in sports centres[9] and once again the ‘experts’ found nothing[10]. They even claimed that the existence MRSA in these centres was ‘highly unlikely’ on the grounds behind the fact that there is absolutely no evidence at all that anyone has ever suffered from an MRSA infection picked up in a Sports Centre in the UK. Ever.[11]

Obviously he knows a truth that others fear, but let’s not hide his light under a bushel. Most ‘experts’ are rather narrow-minded, being conditioned by years of experience, research and training. Show me an MRSA expert who can’t find MRSA in these locations and show you someone who’s blinkered and prejudiced by evidence. Dr Malyszewicz, has the great advantage of being unqualified to do this sort of thing[12] so he comes with no preconceptions. His achievement is even better than that though. He’s finding MRSA with a lab that the Department of Health declared was “not up to UK standards”[13]. Though maybe I’m giving him a bit too much credit. The Health Protection Agency claims that the procedures to find MRSA are complex[14] but Dr Malyszewicz found it with procedures that a Department of Health report said were “substandard”[15]. Perhaps finding MRSA is so easy anyone could do it in a shed in their back garden[16].

Dr Malyszewicz seems to be a man of mystery. I know he got a PhD from East Tennessee State University and I’d love to know more about his research. However, and here’s the odd thing, I can find theses by all sorts of people on the ETSU system (Smith, Jones, Singh) but if you search for Malyszewicz you get nothing at all. I’ve sent an email to Chemsol asking for the title so I can track it down and wallow in his brainspill, but so far I’ve had no reply. I can’t find any of his work on Pubmed either.

It’s baffling. Dr Malyszewicz you’re too modest. Most microbiologists clamour to tell the world of their research. Perhaps it’s the same modesty that means that while he got a degree in Leicester, there’s no record of him getting a degree from the University of Leicester[He does have a degree, see note 16a]. It a shame because he knows so much. An article linked to from Chemsol in the People reveals that he’s found bacteria at up to 44 times the danger rate at McDonalds, Burger King and Pizza Hut. There’s no set danger rate in the UK, but it could be a cultural quirk that there is a defined level of 44x danger. A bit like Fahrenheit having freezing point at 32 degrees. Really you would think he’d publish that seeing as no peer-reviewed paper (that I can find) has defined a safe level of MRSA[17]. Please correct me if I’m wrong on that.

So there you have it. If anyone has any more information on the wonderful work of Dr Malyszewicz I’d be delighted to hear it. But please no off-colour comments casting aspersions on his independence[18] simply because he has a lot of anti-MRSA chemicals he’d like to sell. It would be grubby. It would be low. And it would attract the attention of libel lawyers.

A less charitable view of my favourite doctor can be found at 60 minutes on NineMSN.

For more on MRSA in the UK, there’s the MRSAwatch site by Dave Roberts.

[2] “Such a choice must seem like a snub to Dr Malyszewicz…” from http://www.chemsolconsultancy.com/articles2.htm

[4] Information from Companies house.

[5] For more information see http://www.combact.info/

[6] From the inspection by Professor Brian I Duerden, Inspector of Microbiology and Dr Geoff Ridgway, Senior Medical Officer and Consultant Medical Microbiologist.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[16] The DoH report actually says: “Chemsol Laboratory is a freestanding, single story wooden building, approximately 6m x 2m in the back garden of Dr Malyszewicz’s house…” Most back garden sheds are about 3m x 2m I think so I’m not sure the term “shed” is entirely appropriate here.

[16a] The DoH report solved this problem. His degree is from what was Leicester Polytechnic and now De Montfort University. Technically that would make it a university in Leicester.

[17] This is all rather confusing. Chemsol link directly to the article which states this ‘safe level’ thing with no comment, which I assume means they’re happy with it. Yet the DoH report states: “The newspaper reports had quoted Dr Malyszewicz as saying that MRSA contamination levels in hospital environmental samples were various multiples above ‘safe levels’. In discussion Dr Malyszewicz agreed that there were no such validated levels and no scientific evidence on which to base such an assessment. He stated that he had been misquoted by the newspapers.” Even more confusing the sampling results on Dr Malyszewicz’s screen (he doesn’t seem to have hard copies of his results) did have a ‘Safe Level’. How odd.

[18] Source Chemsol Consultancy themselves at http://www.chemsolconsultancy.com/articles2.htm . So independent that they seem to have eschewed UK accreditation.

Update 15 May 2006: This originally went up 10 Aug 2005, since then academic ninja Ben Goldacre has taken on Malyszewicz repeatedly. I was a bit surprised to see another spurt of searches for combact again, but as Bad Science points out he’s back. —–

 
 
 

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