HEALTHInfectious trend: Drug-resistant staphOutbreaks of CA-MRSA are becoming more and more common, prompting primary care physicians to learn about the strains circulating in their communities.By Kathleen Phalen Tomaselli, amednews correspondent. April 4, 2005. This is a story about otherwise healthy children confronting life-or-death circumstances after small wound infections spread to lungs, bones and joints. It's about pneumonia that has gone out of control and about entire athletic teams being benched because of rampant, angry abscesses. On one level, these topics might seem disparate. But there is a unifying theme, because the overall story is about community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a brand of staph that is increasingly viewed as a public health epidemic. With more and more cases occurring across the country, primary care physicians are being urged to rethink how they treat it when they see it. "This raises the bar for doctors," says Robert Harrison MD, PhD, MPH, infectious disease pediatrician and hospital epidemiologist at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. "We have to change our thinking about staph, about how we use antibiotics and about how worried we should be when we see staph." Methicillin-resistant staph long has been associated with hospitals and the seriously ill. But in the late 1990s, doctors began seeing unusual patterns of MRSA, particularly among healthy patients without traditional risk factors. "We began to see children from the community with MRSA," says Robert S. Daum, MD, professor of pediatrics and microbiology at the University of Chicago. Dr. Daum, who is heading several CA-MRSA studies, including one funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the community isolates are very different from the hospital-acquired type. Genetically distinct, CA-MRSA causes a different spectrum of illness, including skin and soft tissue infections that could be severe and have different antibiotic susceptibility. [...]Full text of American Medical News content is available to AMA members and paid subscribers.
Copyright 2005 American Medical Association. All rights reserved.
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