USA300 MRSA may cause more severe HC infections
CDC studying patient outcomes of community bug
As the USA300 strain of community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) increasingly besieges hospitals and displaces traditional nosocomial strains the widely held perception is that patient outcomes are going to suffer. After all, if CA-MRSA is capable of putting an otherwise healthy football player at death's door what is it going to do to the ICU patient connected to one too many invasive devices?
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is studying the issue in a project that will use its active bacterial core surveillance system for invasive bacterial infections. Patient infections with the USA300 strain will be compared against those infected with USA100, a typical nosocomial strain, explains Rachel Gorwitz, MD, MPH, a medical epidemiologist in the CDC division of healthcare quality promotion.
"We are looking retrospectively back at cases and also doing some additional chart review through that (surveillance) system," she tells Hospital Infection Control. "We already have the cases identified and we have the pulsed-field typing."
The emerging consensus suggests the CDC will find that USA300 will indeed be a more formidable hospital pathogen than its displaced brethren. No less an authority than Henry F. "Chip" Chambers, MD, chief of the division of infectious diseases at San Francisco General Hospital, has pointed out that this bug is not only more virulent but it is apparently more transmissible. Gorwitz has seen the signs as well.
"We know that health care strains of MRSA have been around for a long time and they don't seem to have spread out a lot of significant disease into the community," she says. "And we know that these community strains are capable of at least skin infections and sometimes more severe infections in otherwise healthy people. So there is a possibility that these strains could cause even more severe infections in people with [invasive] devices or that are otherwise immune compromised in health care settings. That is the hypothesis that we are investigating."
As the USA300 strain of community-acquired methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA) increasingly besieges hospitals and displaces traditional nosocomial strains the widely held perception is that patient outcomes are going to suffer.You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
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