Like Port Townsend High School, high schools in Sacramento and Modesto, Calif., and in at least seven other states have disinfected their locker rooms, bathrooms and sports equipment after students came down with suspected antibiotic-resistant staph infections.
Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus — known as MRSA — has been prompted school administrators to take preventive measures against the potentially dangerous bacterial infection.
While health officials stress the vast majority of MRSA infections occur in hospitals and nursing homes — and those cases usually involve people with existing health problems — infections also have been turning up in schools, especially in places like gyms and locker rooms where students share towels and athletic equipment.
For people who are otherwise healthy, health officials say, MRSA infections usually heal on their own or with treatment.
Serious complications are rare.
Health officials say they’re not aware of the infection spreading in schools except sometimes among sports teams.
They also say that the number of cases emerging now is neither surprising nor alarming.
More infections may be surfacing in part because people are on hyper-alert after recent media reports about MRSA deaths — and thus more are being tested for it.
While healthy people normally make a full recovery, MRSA is believed to have been responsible last month for the death of a Virginia high school student.
New York state health officials also believe it caused the death of a New York City middle school student last month.
Responds to treatment
According to health officials, good hygiene — such as washing hands — is the best defense against the bacteria, and any open wounds need to be cleaned and covered.
Unlike the more deadly and difficult to treat form of MRSA found in hospitals, the community form found at schools responds well to treatment and is rarely fatal but is more contagious, said Dr. John Walker, a Stanislaus County, Calif., public health officer.
“It is resistant to a specific drug called methicillin, which is what we normally prescribe, but it is not an organism that is resistant to all antibiotics,” Walker said.
“It is very, very important to note that this is treatable, and it is rarely fatal.”
Although the exceptions aren’t fully understood, he said, people with immune deficiencies and diabetes are at higher risk for developing a fatal case.
The infection resembles a spider bite and often is mistaken for one.
It is often are red, swollen and painful — and most often affects areas of previous cuts or abrasions.
If untreated, it can lead to complications.
Public health officials have launched information campaigns during the past two years targeting highest-risk groups, including sports teams apt to be in environments with skin-to-skin contact where the infection is transmitted.
They urge disinfecting locker rooms and hand washing or using antibacterial alcohol cleansers.
Heightened awareness
Public health officials said more cases of suspected MRSA are being reported because of increased awareness triggered by a report last month from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that in 2005 an estimated 94,000 Americans became seriously ill from it and nearly 19,000 died.
That is more than people who died from AIDS, but fewer than the number killed annually by complications from seasonal flu.
Bruce Hirsch, an infectious disease physician at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., said the increase in MRSA infections hasn’t occurred in the last few weeks but over the last decade.
“This is kind of old news to us,” he said.
He emphasized there is “no dreadful new epidemic.”
But he said that the increase in community-acquired MRSA, which he in part attributed to the overuse of antibiotics, is troubling.
