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Category Archives: surveillance

Not-reimbursing hospitals for MRSA: The reaction

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You’ll remember that early in the summer we talked about the proposal by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to cease reimbursing hospitals for the additional care of a patient that is required when a hospital gives a patient a nosocomial infection. CMS has been debating whether to include several types of hospital-acquired infection [...]

Antibiotic resistance in food animals all across Europe

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Via a journal that’s new to me — the Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, the open-access journal of the Veterinary Associations of the Nordic Countries — comes an amazing review of the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in cattle in 13 European countries. Based on 25,241 isolates collected over three years, Denmark, Britain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and [...]

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 [...]

"Leaky" hospitals redux: When HA is CA

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The CDC work below and several other papers published recently attribute a good proportion of CA-MRSA to hospital strains that have left the institution in a colonized patient and sickened that patient at some point post-discharge. But several papers presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America underline that MRSA [...]

New news on invasive MRSA rates: headed down?

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I am at the annual conference of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, where authentic news was released Sunday, in a very quiet way. Last fall, a team of authors from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association that for the first time estimated [...]

CA-MRSA increasing in Denmark

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Again from the annual meeting of the Society for General Microbiology, a report that CA-MRSA cases are rising in Denmark, a country with a very low incidence rate of HA-MRSA — about 1% of isolates — thanks to aggressive screening of any patient who has been treated abroad as well as any health care worker [...]

CA-MRSA — not just a US problem

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One of the mysteries of MRSA research has been the apparent difference in MRSA prevalence in different countries. Hospital-associated MRSA is a well-understood foe in Europe, but identification of CA-MRSA is infrequent. So is CA-MRSA actually less common in other countries, or is that an artifact produced by less surveillance there or more awareness here? A [...]

Typing and fingerprinting: Who pays?

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More on the issue of doing more microbiology to track the epidemiology of CA-MRSA (raised in an exchange below between me and Medifix, to whom many thanks for being my first commenter!). In my slog through the endless and growing MRSA literature, I came across a paper that poses the problem much better than I [...]

Yes, it is everywhere

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Via the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, a report from a multi-country European team that surveyed CA-MRSA isolates from around the world to determine their ability to produce Panton-Valentine leukocidin, the potent toxin blamed for CA-MRSA’s unique ability to cause eruptions on healthy-appearing skin. Deep-seated infections due to PVL-positive S. aureus can be extremely severe. For example, [...]