Rapid New Test Developed for MRSA

A new screening method for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) slashes the time needed to identify patients with MRSA by 75%, decreasing the time between screening and notification of results from four days to one day, according to a new study published in the January 31, 2006, online issue of Critical Care by Biomed Central (www.biomedcentral.com).

Stephan Harbarth and colleagues from the Geneva University Hospitals (Switzerland; www.hug-ge.ch) used quantitative MRSA (qMRSA), a new screening method that identifies MRSA DNA in patient swabs, to test 1,053 patients upon admission to the medical intensive care unit (ICU) and the surgical ICU in Geneva University Hospital. The study ran from January 2003 to August 2005. Standard microbiologic methods were used to compare the time it took to get results of qMRSA with this method versus historical records of the time taken to get notification of test results.

The median time from ICU admission until notification of test results decreased from 87 hours to 21 hours in the surgical ICU and from 106 hours to 23 hours in the medical ICU. Infected patients immediately after MRSA detection substantially decreased MRSA infections in the medical ICU but not in the surgical ICU. In the surgical ICU, qMRSA spared 245 MRSA-negative patients a total of 1, 227 unnecessary days in isolation.




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