Link: ABC News:
Up until recently, doctors hadn’t seen MRSA in healthy young people outside the hospital, said Dr. Richard Daum of University of Chicago Hospitals. "MRSA is a denizen of the hospital," he said. "It lives here."
But now, 65 percent of the staphylococcus infections coming into his emergency room in otherwise healthy kids are MRSA, he said. To him, that rate of growth is alarmingly fast — a cause for concern.
MRSA is resistant to anywhere from 15 to 30 different antibiotics. That means when it’s detected, a doctor has only a very small number of compounds at hand that are able to kill it.
Daum said he has seen some patients with MRSA that are worse off for having seen a doctor that could not recognize it. The patients were treated with regular antibiotics — and that gave the germ more time to do damage in the body.
"We’ve seen a lot of kids that come in here that needed intensive care and in fact have died that have started off by being out in the community, where they get an old treatment and then come in here having failed it," he said.
