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Drug-Resistant Bugs Growing, Study Finds

Super staph increasingly found outside of health-care settings

October 16, 2007      Spanish

• Public Citizen Proposes Basic Safety Reforms • Medicare Penalizes Hospitals for Treating Disadvantaged Patients • CDC Steps Up Efforts to Fight MRSA Infections • FDA Clears First Quick Test For 'Super Staph' • Drug-Resistant Bugs Growing, Study Finds • CDC Slow to Act Against Hospital Infections, Critic Charges • Study: Cell Phones Reduce Hospital Errors • Hospitals Slow to Improve Patient Safety • Hospital Sloppiness Costing Taxpayers Billions • States Take Aim at Hospital Infections • Hospital Computer Keyboards Can Spread Germs, Study Finds • Medicare Launches Hospital Comparison Site

A new study warns that potentially lethal drug-resistant staph infections are becoming more common, and not just in hospitals where growth has already been documented.

Results of the study are published in the Oct. 17 issue of JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Called methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, these infections are the leading cause of skin infections among hospital patients. Besides being painful, they can cause serious, even fatal illness.

"Invasive MRSA is an important public health problem," said lead researcher Dr. R. Monina Klevens, an epidemiologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Klevens and a group of researchers used data from the Active Bacterial Core surveillance/Emerging Infections Program Network from July 2004 through December 2005 to estimate the incidence of MRSA infection in the U.S.

The study documented 8,987 cases of invasive MRSA. Most of these were found in community health care settings, 26.6 percent were in hospitals, and nearly 14 percent were not associated with health care facilities.

Senior citizens were most vulnerable and African Americans were more likely than whites to be infected.

Based on their findings, the researchers estimated that there were 94,360 cases of invasive MRSA in the United States in 2005, resulting in more than 18,000 deaths.

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