Deadly Superbug Evades Hospital Screening

March 11, 2008— -- Efforts to screen patients for drug-resistant staph infections at the time of their hospital admissions appear to be ineffective in stemming the spread of the potentially deadly "superbug" known as MRSA, new research suggests.

The finding is the latest bad news for the control of the bacteria MRSA — short for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus. The germ, which doctors believe gained its drug-resistant properties from years of inappropriate antibiotic use, garnered headlines in October when researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified it as the culprit in an estimated 94,000 life-threatening infections and 18,650 deaths in 2005.

The latest research, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, shows that the stubborn bug appears to evade hospital screening efforts intended to keep it in check.

Between July 2004 and May 2006, researchers looked at more than 20,000 surgical patients at a Swiss teaching hospital. Roughly half were part of hospitalized groups in which all patients were screened for the disease upon admission. The other half were not subject to such screening measures.

What they found was that, screening or not, the levels of MRSA that spread were about the same for all patients — a finding that flies in the face of recommendations by top health policy makers and experts aimed at catching the disease early, before it can spread unchecked through hospitals.

Lead study author Dr. Stephan Harbarth of the University Hospital of Geneva in Switzerland said the new research reinforces the idea that antibiotics must be used more judiciously, particularly in the United States, in order to avoid the emergence of such drug-resistant infections.

"There's incredible antibiotic pressure in U.S. hospitals," Harbarth said. "Length of stay for patients is extremely short, and they get bombarded with antibiotics, so it helps to create favorable environment to select these resistant organisms."