WASHINGTON — A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported Tuesday.
The microbe, a strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated.
“This is a significant public health problem. We should be very worried,” said Scott Fridkin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC.
Other researchers noted that the estimate includes only the most serious infections caused by the bug, known as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
“It’s really just the tip of the iceberg,” said Elizabeth Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at the Los Angeles Department of Public Health who wrote an editorial accompanying the new research. “It is astounding.”
On Monday, a Virginia teenager died from MRSA, prompting officials to shut down 21 Bedford County schools. The infection had spread to Ashton Bonds’ kidneys, liver, lungs and the muscle around his heart.
MRSA is a strain of the ubiquitous bacterium that usually causes “staph” infections that are easily treated with common antibiotics in the penicillin family, such as methicillin and amoxicillin.
Resistant strains of the organism, however, have been increasingly turning up in hospitals and in small outbreaks outside of heath-care settings, such as among athletes, prison inmates and children.
The germ, which is spread by casual contact, rapidly turns minor abscesses and other skin infections into serious health problems, including painful, disfiguring “necrotizing” abscesses that eat away tissue. The infections can often still be treated by lancing and draining sores and quickly administering other antibiotics, such as bactrim.
But in some cases the microbe gets into the lungs, causing unusually serious pneumonia, or spreads into bone, vital organs and the bloodstream, triggering life-threatening complications. Those patients must be hospitalized and given intensive care, including intravenous antibiotics such as vancomycin.
Researchers calculated that MRSA was striking 31 out of every 100,000 Americans, which translates into 94,360 cases and 18,650 deaths nationwide. In comparison, the AIDS virus killed about 12,500 Americans in 2005.
The MRSA estimate was released Tuesday with a report that a strain of another bacterium, which causes ear infections in children, has become impervious to every approved antibiotic for youngsters.
“Taken together, what these two papers show is that we’re increasingly facing antibiotic resistant forms of these very common organisms,” Bancroft said.
The reports underscore the need to develop new antibiotics and curb the unnecessary use of those already available, experts said. They should also alert doctors to be on the look-out for antibiotic-resistant infections so patients can be treated with the few remaining effective drugs before they develop complications, experts said.
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