Doctors Baffled by Superbug's Presence

Oct. 18, 2007 — -- More reports of the potentially deadly superbug are popping up around the country, just days after three teenagers died after developing the drug-resistant infection.

Public health officials say they are baffled as to why the bug, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, has spread.

MRSA used to be found only inside hospitals, spread from patient to patient. Now it is infecting healthy people in their communities, homes or schools.

The Associated Press reports that officials at one North Carolina high school say at least six football players have been infected with the MRSA strain, and in West Virginia, at least seven students at three different schools have been diagnosed with MRSA.

And in Richmond, Ind., health officials spent the day disinfecting the locker room of the local high school after a student apparently came down with the infection.

Three children have died from MRSA in the last week: an 11-year-old in New Hampshire and a 4-year-old in Mississippi, whose names were not released, along with 17-year-old Ashton Bonds of Virginia.

A government study released this week says 90,000 people could get infected this year.

For those that contract the infection, health officials say the key is to catch it early.

To see 2-year-old Evan McFarling today, one could hardly guess he survived a battle against an invisible assailant — one that could have ended his young life.

But any doubt as to the magnitude of his struggle against the drug-resistant germ methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, disappears when Evan's shirt is removed, exposing the surgical scar on his chest he received when he was only 8 months old.

"He ended up having heart surgery over it," said Matt McFarling, Evan's father. "Somehow it got into his pericardium," he said, referring to the fluid-filled sack that surrounds the heart.

"There is no reason an 8-month-old should be having heart surgery. It's pretty scary," said McFarling, who lives in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The evidence of MRSA is more apparent in the case of 12-year-old Hunter Spence from Victoria, Texas. She fought off an MRSA infection in May. While she escaped with her life, she sustained significant lung damage, forcing her to go through several surgeries. Hunter may have to return to the operating room in January for another lung procedure.

"She's going back to school and starting back on a fairly routine schedule, but she had a lot of lung damage," said Payton Spence, Hunter's mother. "Her leg, where she developed the infection originally, is pretty much back, but it's not 100 percent."

"We really don't know how it happened and that's really another scary issue."

And as these reports emerge around the country, doctors remain largely puzzled as to why MRSA — an infection traditionally thought to only infect already sick patients while they lie in hospital beds — is threatening the lives of young, previously healthy children living in their own communities, not in a hospital.

"Some of us in pediatrics have been very concerned with this since the late 1990s and early 2000s," said Dr. Jaime Fergie, director of the pediatric infectious diseases unit at Driscoll Children's Hospital, in Corpus Christi, where he treated both Evan and Hunter.