Blog

Category Archives: USA 300

November 25, 2009

Community MRSA rates rising, and epidemics converging

0 Comments
A study published Tuesday in Emerging Infectious Diseases makes me happy, despite its grim import, because it confirms something that I will say in SUPERBUG: Community MRSA strains are moving into hospitals, blurring the lines between the two epidemics. The study is by researchers at the excellent Extending the Cure project of Resources for the [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in MRSA, USA 100, community, hospitals, surveillance
May 29, 2009

MRSA and H1N1 "swine" flu – still not a lot of evidence

2 Comments
Hello again, constant readers. It’s busy out there. The CDC said Wednesday that new infections with the novel H1N1 virus (Formerly Known As Swine Flu) may be trending down. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of rumor and speculation out there regarding what role MRSA pneumonia may have played in serious cases. The CDC commented on [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in MRSA, influenza, invasive, pneumonia
May 7, 2009

MRSA strains crossing borders: US CA-MRSA to Italy

0 Comments
Swine flu continues to dominate the headlines, but other pathogens don’t read the papers. Case in point: New news about a US community strain being found and treated in a woman in Italy — better treated, as it turns out, than she was in California, where she was infected. In a new letter in Emerging Infectious [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in Europe, MRSA, USA 400, antibiotics, community
April 13, 2009

MRSA in a hospital nursery

0 Comments
Via the Boston Globe and the blog of the hospital’s CEO comes work of an ongoing outbreak of community-associated MRSA in the newborn nursery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston: …between last November and March, BIDMC experienced several occurrences or “clusters” of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, infections that have affected some of our [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in colonization, hospitals, infection control, newborn
March 12, 2009

New York Times takes up "pig MRSA" ST398

0 Comments
Constant readers, I know that many of you are very interested in ST 398, the “pig strain” of MSRA that has caused both mild and life-threatening human infections in Europe and has been found in retail meat in Canada and on farms and in farmers here in the Midwest. So I just want to [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in MRSA, ST 398, animals, antibiotics, community, food, pigs
March 12, 2009

MRSA and animals — an elephant, this time.

0 Comments
So, constant readers, I have wrestled another chapter to the ground — and thus have a few minutes’ breathing space to talk about a story that some of you have asked about privately. I’ve been wondering whether to post on this, because the entire episode is in the book, and I don’t want to [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in MRSA, ST 398, animals, elephant, recurrent, zoonotic
November 9, 2008

MRSA in meat in Louisiana: pig meat, human strain

0 Comments
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 [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in MRSA, MSSA, ST 398, USA 100, animals, colonization, community, food, nosocomial, pigs, zoonotic
November 4, 2008

Final report from ICAAC-IDSA 08 (news from ICAAC, 3)

0 Comments
The ICAAC-IDSA (48th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy and 46th annual meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America) meeting ended a week ago, and I’m still thrashing my way through the thousands of abstracts. Here’s my final, highly unscientific selection of papers that caught my eye: * Evidence that the community-strain clone USA300 is [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in ICAAC, IDSA, ST 398, animals, fomites, infection control, jail, linezolid, pigs, poor, resistance, zoonotic
September 16, 2008

UK grapples with community MRSA

0 Comments
Regular readers in the US will have noticed that the MRSA situation here is quite different from Europe. In the UK, for instance, hospital MRSA has been an enormous scandal, but community MRSA — both skin and soft-tissue infections, and fatal invasive infections such as necrotizing pneumonia — has been much less of a concern. That [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in Europe, MRSA, PVL, UK, community, invasive
April 8, 2008

"Leaky" hospitals redux: When HA is CA

0 Comments
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 [...]
Written by Maryn McKenna
Also posted in colonization, community, hospitals, invasive, nosocomial, surveillance