TSS is a rare disease that mainly strikes menstruating women who are using tampons. About 15 women out of every 100,000 menstruating women come down with TSS. It is caused by a bacteria called Staphylococcus aureus. Scientists don't exactly know how all of this works yet, but somehow the combination of a tampon in a warm vagina is the perfect place for this bacteria to live and multiply. This bacteria lets off toxins or poisons, and these get into a woman's bloodstream and make her very sick. If it a bad case goes untreated the woman could die or suffer permanent effects.
Menstruating women are not the only people who can get TSS, men, children and women who are not having their periods sometimes get TSS for other reasons, but most TSS cases are found in women using tampons. Women under 30, and especially women between 15 to 19 are at the most risk because they have not yet developed any resistance to the toxins. Older women who have used tampons for years may develop some immunity because they have been exposed to small doses over time.
- A high fever - over 102 degrees
- Nausea
- Vomiting
- Diarrhea
- Sore throat and aching muscles
- A rash that looks like sunburn, especially on the hands and feet
- Dizziness or fainting - a drop in blood pressure
If you have any of these symptoms while wearing a tampon take it out immediately and call a doctor. Tell them you have been using tampons and you think you have TSS.
The symptoms are very much like flu symptoms, so it might be tempting to just wait and see if its the flu, or if it will go away. But if you are having your period and using tampons take these symptoms very seriously. TSS moves so fast that an overnight delay could be fatal.
The sooner you get treatment, the better. TSS moves through your body quickly. Your doctor can do a test to see if the bacteria is present in your vagina. For a mild case of TSS, you might just have to go to bed and drink lots of fluids. If its a severe case, you will have to be hospitalized. Again, TSS can be fatal and needs serious attention.
When TSS is in its advanced stages, it is a really ugly disease. Until I started researching it, I thought that if you had bad TSS you just had a really high fever and went into a coma or something. The truth is scary, but something you should know.
Your blood pressure goes down, which puts your body into shock. Your skin will shed, as if you have been badly burned. You might experience respiratory failure (you can't breath for yourself) or kidney failure (your kidneys stop cleaning your blood). Because your blood is not circulating well, the cells in your fingers and toes (the parts of your body which are farthest away from your heart) will start to die from lack of oxygen, and if a lot of the cells die, you could loose parts of your fingers and toes, or entire fingers and toes. This is the same kind of thing that happens when people get bad frostbite.
The after effects of a case of TSS are serious too. Women who have survived a bad case may loose their hair and fingernails, have double vision, headaches, deafness, or arthritis for months or even years.
Now that you are scared to death...
Obviously, you can choose not to wear tampons, or use other internal products like sea sponges.
However, using tampons wisely can give you much better odds of staying healthy. There are two things you should think about each time you use a tampon: its absorbancy (how much fluid it can hold) and length of time it will be in you.
The more absorbant a tampon is, the more dangerous it is. Some people think the reason for this is that more absorbant tampons are made of a blend of cotton and rayon. Plain cotton seems to be safe, but artificial fibers like rayon have been known to cause trouble (see History, below).
Tampax's Original Regular are 100 percent cotton, and may be one of the safest big brand tampons you can wear. Health food stores sell tampons100 percent cotton and also bleached in environmentally friendly ways.
There are now charts on all tampon boxes which show the absorbancy levels of the different sizes of tampons. Choose a tampon size that is the minimum that you need for your flow. In other words, a super-plus tampon might be fine if you will bleed through it in a few hours, but a tampon shouldn't be used as a plug you can leave in all day long.
Don't wear tampons for a long time. The best thing to do is to alternate between using tampons and pads. At the very least, use smaller tampons and change them more often. Never go to bed wearing a tampon (wear a pad instead), or wear the same tampon all day long. Now, if your flow is very light, you will notice that it is hard to change tampons because they are sort of dry. This isn't very good for you either, so you might just want to wear a mini pad on those light days.
By using lower absorbancy tampons, changing tampons frequently, and taking breaks from tampons at some point each day, you can make it very hard for that bacteria to cause you any trouble. Remember, as a new tampon user, you have the least defenses against the bacteria, so try to be careful.
Tampons were invented in the 1930's, and at that time they were made of compressed cotton. But they leaked when they were soaked through, so tampon manufactures began to experiment with materials which would make a better (more absorbant), tampon. They found their answer in synthetic fibers. Proctor & Gamble wanted to make a leak - proof tampon. They succeeded by using a blend of synthetic fibers which included polyester sponges and chips of carboxy-methyl-cellulose. They called their new tampon RELY and put it on store shelves in 1975. This encouraged an "absorbancy race" among other tampon manufacturers. So by 1980 the market was full of new super absorbant tampons. Reports of TSS began to flood in during the spring and summer of 1980, and all tampon brands were implicated, but particularly RELY. Somehow the swelling of the synthetic fibers made an ideal growing place for the bacteria. Maybe it also was due to the the fact that women didn't change these tampons as much.
By 1981 absorbancy was found to be the key risk factor in tampon related TSS. Any high absorbancy tampon was proved to increase a woman's risk of getting TSS. Playtex's Super Plus was deemed a "high risk" tampon. Following the TSS breakout, Tambrands (makers of Tampax) reissued the safer all cotton Original Regular style, but retained super absorbant ingredients in its other models.
In 1985 the family of Betty Ogilvie, a woman who had died from TSS, won their lawsuit against International Playtex. They were awarded eleven million dollars, because the jury found that Playtex had shown reckless disregard for women's lives by continuing to make the super high abosorbancy tampons when it was known that they were a major cause of TSS.
Now the big tampon companies are using a cotton/rayon blend for their
products instead of the very dangerous super-absorbant materials. The highest
absorbancy per tampon is now 6 -15 grams of fluid compared to the 10 -
20 gram range they had achieved with the super-absorbants.