Drug-resistant staph infections found outside of hospitals

Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control had hoped that the infections were simply "leaking" from hospitals and being misattributed to outside populations, but studies in the northeastern and Midwestern United States have disproved that. Staph bacteria commonly cause skin infections, including pimples and boils, but more malignant varieties, including flesh-eating strains, have been found.

• Dangerous drug-resistant staph infections are increasingly showing up outside hospitals -- including among inmates, children and athletes, alarmed researchers find.
• Dangerous drug-resistant staph infections are showing up at an alarming rate outside of hospitals and nursing homes in the United States.
• New research found that in one part of the country, as many as one in five infections were picked up out in the community.
• Until recently, these hard-to-treat cases were seen only in hospitals and other healthcare settings where they can spread to patients with open wounds or tubes and cause serious complications.
• Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suspected that those outside infections might just be leaking out of hospitals rather than emerging from the general population.
• But studies in Baltimore, the Atlanta area and Minnesota proved that theory wrong.
• Overall, researchers found 17 percent of drug-resistant staph infections were caught in the community and did not have any apparent links to healthcare settings.
• ''The bugs are winning, unfortunately, and we need to catch up,'' said Dr. Loren Miller, one of the researchers at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
• ``We really need to rapidly develop antibiotics to catch up with the bugs and start using antibiotics more appropriately.''
• Staph bacteria are a common cause of skin infections.
• When infections occur, they are mostly pimples and boils, but the germ can cause serious surgical wound infections, bloodstream infections and pneumonia.
• Three-quarters of the community-acquired cases in the CDC study were skin infections, but 23 percent of the cases required hospitalization.
• Staph bacteria resistant to the penicillin drug family are called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.
• More than 80 percent of the 12,553 cases were excluded because the patients had been hospitalized, had a history of surgery or dialysis or had another risk factor.