Heeding the MRSA warning

A new study offers national estimates of this infection's reach -- and a wake-up call.

Editorial. Nov. 26, 2007.

A confluence of events recently propelled the subject of drug resistance into the mainstream. Public health experts maintain that it should have been there all along.

The events are worthy of note for various reasons.

For starters, last month the Journal of the American Medical Association published a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report estimating the incidence of invasive methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in the United States. The study was important because it represented the first such effort to quantify the burden of this infection, both hospital-acquired and community-acquired, on a national basis.

At just about the same time, news reports around the country were detailing outbreaks of MRSA on the local level. Some cases involved the deaths of young people infected with this illness. In others, school systems where students were found to have MRSA closed their doors for deep cleaning.

Many parents weren't aware of MRSA, and what they heard shocked and scared them. In the wake of these disturbing anecdotal reports, they took their children to doctors for skin cultures and for answers.

Meanwhile, the impact of the data further raised awareness, both among health professionals and in the mainstream. And for good reason. Based on 8,987 observed cases of MRSA and 1,598 in-hospital deaths among patients with MRSA, the CDC researchers estimated that 94,360 invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States in 2005. In 18,650 of these cases, the infections were associated with death. An editorial appearing in the same issue of JAMA noted that if these projections proved accurate, the associated death tally would exceed the total number of U.S. deaths attributable to HIV/AIDS in that year.