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Category Archives: MSSA

One surgical infection with MRSA: $61,000

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From a multi-state, public-private research team — Duke University, Wayne State University, and the Durham, NC VA — comes a precise and alarming calculation of MRSA’s costs in hospitals: For one post-surgery infection, $61,681. The group compared the course, costs and final outcome of three matched groups of patients from one tertiary-care center and six community [...]

More MRSA in pigs, in Portugal

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A brand-new report, in a letter to the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents, indicates that ST398 “pig MRSA” has been found in Portugal for the first time. Constanca Pomba and colleagues from the Technical University of Lisbon swabbed and cultured the noses of pigs and veterinarians on two pig farms in different regions of Portugal, and [...]

Child deaths from flu + MRSA, again

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Folks, I am close to manuscript deadline and so keep disappearing down the rabbit hole; forgive me if I don’t post as regularly as usual, I’ll be back as soon as I can. I wanted to point out the announcement by the Centers for Disease Control late Friday that we are starting to see children dying [...]

"Pig MRSA" in New York City – via the Dominican Republic?

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Folks: Back in October, I broke the news for you of an intriguing poster presentation at the ICAAC meeting. It revealed the discovery of ST 398, the anomalous staph strain found in pigs, pig farmers and health care workers in Europe, in residents of a Dominican-immigrant neighborhood in northern Manhattan, and also in the [...]

MRSA in meat in Louisiana: pig meat, human strain

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On Nov. 3, I posted on an enterprising group of TV stations in the Pacific Northwest who had retail meat in four states tested for MRSA. I said at the time that it was the first finding of MRSA in meat in the US that I knew of. Turns out that I was wrong by three [...]

TV stations find MRSA in retail pork in Pacific Northwest

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In the comments, Coilin Nunan of the UK’s Soil Association (which published the wonderful 2007 report MRSA in Farm Animals and Meat report) calls attention to a report that I also spotted over the weekend. A network of TV stations in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and California did a joint report in which they bought 97 packages [...]

Microbes in US meat, but no MRSA

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The ICAAC-IDSA meeting has ended, but there are still many abstracts that I have not been through. While I pore over them, though, an interesting paper has just been published that somewhat contradicts earlier research on the presence of MRSA in meat. (Earlier posts are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.) The researchers, [...]

ST 398 in New York City – via the Dominican Republic?

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Here’s a piece of MRSA news from the ICAAC meeting (see the post just below) that is intriguing enough to deserve its own post. US and Caribbean researchers have found preliminary evidence of the staph strain ST 398, the animal-origin strain that has caused human illness in the Netherlands and has recently been found in [...]

Child deaths from flu + MRSA

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Steve Smith of the Boston Globe (who is really good, and I say that as someone who used to compete against him) has a story up regarding state and national concern over children’s deaths from MRSA pneumonia. There have been two such deaths in Massachusetts this year. These are the sort of deaths that make [...]

A staph vaccine: How much would it help?

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One more post on research from the meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America: Many MRSA researchers believe that the only way to truly control the pathogen — especially out in the community — will be through a vaccine. Lay aside for the moment how problematic introducing a new vaccine can be these days, [...]