Patrick Schlievert, who published a study on it in 2004, determined incidence at three to four out of 100,000 tampon users per year; the information supplied by manufacturers of sanitary products such as Tampax and Stayfree puts it at one to 17 of every 100,000 menstruating females per year.TSS was considered a sporadic disease that occurred in immunocompromised people. It was not a more well-known disease until the 1980s, when high-absorbency tampons were in use by menstruating women. Due to the idea of the tampons having a high absorbency this led women to believe that they could leave a tampon in for several hours. Doing this allowed the bacteria to grow and infect women. This resulted in a spike of cases of TSS.Philip M. Tierno Jr. helped determine that tampons were behind TSS cases in the early 1980s. Tierno blames the introduction of higher-absorbency tampons in 1978. A study by Tierno also determined that all-cotton tampons were less likely to produce the conditions in which TSS can grow; this was done using a direct comparison of 20 brands of tampons including conventional cotton/rayon tampons and 100% organic cotton tampons from Natracare. In fact, Dr Tierno goes as far to state, "The bottom line is that you can get TSS with synthetic tampons, but not with an all-cotton tampon.
She did not recover, and died sixteen days later on April 22 from toxic shock poisoning at the age of 42. Mike Von Erich, d. 1987, developed the syndrome after shoulder surgery: he made an apparent recovery but experienced brain damage and weight loss as a result of the condition; he died by suicide later. References
External links
Stevens DL (1995). "Streptococcal toxic-shock syndrome: spectrum of disease, pathogenesis, and new concepts in treatment". Emerging Infectious Diseases. 1 (3): 69–78. doi:10.3201/eid0103.950301. PMC 2626872. PMID 8903167. "Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS): The Facts". Toxic Shock Syndrome information service. tssis.com.