The organism can be difficult to control because its early symptoms are so benign, and because those who are infected frequently delay seeking medical intervention until the organism has begun to spread.
Creech and colleagues visited one of Nashville's large community pediatric practices, and the Vanderbilt Children's Hospital Outpatient Pediatric Clinic, to swab the noses of 500 otherwise healthy children to collect samples. Three years earlier a similar study had been done in the same practices and Creech wanted to see whether things had changed.
"We were just trying to get a sense of how common MRSA actually is in the community," he said. "We've known for over a half century that staphylococcus likes to live in the nose and that's where it thrives. If it's not in the nose, you probably don't have it. So we went out and collected these samples."
What Creech and colleagues discovered was that 9.2 percent of the children from this sampling were positive for MRSA in their noses. "That's up dramatically from three years ago when only 1 percent had MRSA," he said.
"What we are able to show is that the increasing incidence of this organism is not just an isolated phenomenon among football players, prisoners and others in close communal settings," he said. "These are young healthy children who are coming in for well child visits and they have the resistant organisms in their noses."
Creech says the next mystery to be solved is why MRSA is increasing in healthy people.
"This study tells us there are a lot of children walking around with MRSA who are healthy, but we are also seeing this germ cause infections. What we are trying to understand is why some children go on to develop a serious infection and others don't."
Vanderbilt Children's Hospital has had adolescents in the intensive care units suffering from pneumonia and others with the organism in the bloods
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Contact: John Howser
john.howser@vanderbilt.edu
615-322-4747
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
18-Mar-2005