Hospital Infections Prevalent in the United States

A new study reports that as many as 1.2 million hospital patients in the United States are infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections annually, with up to 120,000 patients of them dying.

The study, authored by Dr. William Jarvis, former acting director of the hospital infections program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, GA, USA) and currently at the Association for Professionals in Infection Control & Epidemiology (APIC, Washington, DC, USA), is based on surveys sent during 2006 to 10,000 infection-control practitioners, including doctors and nurses in hospitals, nursing homes, and rehabilitation facilities. Participants were asked to select one day between October 1, 2005, and November 10, 2005, and report all known MRSA cases in their institutions. More than 1,200 hospitals and 100 nursing homes and rehabilitation facilities responded, supplying data about patients with MRSA infections.

The findings showed that 34 of 1,000 patients in the survey had active MRSA infections and that 12 were colonized with the bacteria, for a total MRSA prevalence rate of 46 per 1,000 patients. Applying the prevalence rates in the new study, the data suggest that 1.2 million hospital patients are afflicted with MRSA each year and that an additional 423,000 patients are colonized with the superbacteria.

"Everything we're finding is telling us the same thing: MRSA is an enormous problem in health-care facilities, more needs to be done to prevent it, and hospitals need to make infection control more of a priority,” said Dr. John Jernigan, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC, and the agency's lead expert on MRSA.

People colonized with MRSA typically carry it in their nose without being symptomatic. The major risk of passing the super-bacteria to others unknowingly by wiping their nose and then touching a table that a doctor or nurse later touches, since MRSA can live on surfaces for days or even weeks.


Related Links:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Association for Professionals in Infection Control & Epidemiology