MRSA Clone Wars: Defeating the Epidemic

In 2002, the estimated number of hospital-acquired or health-care-associated infections in U.S. hospitals, adjusted to include federal facilities, was approximately 1.7 million. There were 98,987 estimated deaths associated with hospital-acquired or health-care-associated infections in U.S. hospitals and, of these, 8205 were due to surgical site infections.

Comparing the 2005 statistics for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) with those from the previous decade, the number of hospital admissions for MRSA had exploded; by 2005, admissions were triple the admissions in 2000 and tenfold higher than the admissions in 1995. In 2005, in the United States alone, 368,600 hospital admissions for MRSA, including 94,000 invasive infections, resulted in 18,650 deaths. The number of MRSA fatalities in 2005 surpassed the number of fatalities from Hurricane Katrina and acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) combined and was substantially higher than fatalities reported at the peak of the U.S. polio epidemic. For a microorganism that had really been virtually unknown prior to 1999, this phenomenon became a silent epidemic. Currently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have a web site devoted solely to MRSA infection

By 2011, an estimated 30,800 fewer invasive MRSA infections occurred in the United States compared with those in 2005. In 2011, fewer infections occurred among patients during hospitalization than among persons in the community without recent health-care exposures. There were 1,737,125 estimated hospital-acquired or health-care-associated infections, of which 290,485 (17%) were surgical site infections. The other infections were central line-associated bloodstream infections, ventilator-associated pneumonia, catheter-associated urinary tract infection, and Clostridium difficile-associated infection. It was predicted that effective strategies for preventing infections outside acute care settings will have the greatest impact on further reducing invasive MRSA infections nationally.