Top local medical officials warned Wednesday that MRSA staph infections have likely reached the level of an epidemic even as area reporting methods leave the scope of the problem unknown.
That troubling assessment comes despite Virginia’s newly enacted reporting requirements designed to measure the scope of the potentially deadly infection. Maryland and D.C. join 28 states in not requiring the reporting of MRSA cases.
Virginia, which began in October reporting only the most dangerous variety of MRSA, has recorded 85 cases, three of which resulted in death. The deaths were among people aged 70-80.
The death this week of Merry F. King, a Montgomery County teacher who took ill just several days before succumbing to a staph infection, has heightened local concern about the scope of the MRSA problem.
Health care officials “have no idea how many” cases have occurred, said Dr. Trish Perl, top epidemiologist at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. “What we really should be doing is insisting that we have the infrastructure to provide the safe patient care,” she said.
Dr. Michael Kerr, who heads the emergency care department at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney, Md., said, “We’ve been seeing hundreds of cases in the past few months — several per day. We’ve been dealing with an epidemic for the past three years.”
Both Maryland and D.C. are considering measures to track MRSA cases and screenings in health care facilities, according to their health officials.
A Center for Disease Control and Prevention study released in October estimated MRSA caused more than 94,000 infections and nearly 19,000 deaths in 2005.
Debate persists about the necessity of reporting the number of MRSA cases. Different diseases, say health officials, require different methods of surveillance. Numbers aren’t recorded for general influenza, for example, because of the logistical nightmare of counting every single case.
“Regardless of the type of surveillance used we are taking the same public health actions, which focus on trying to get people to take those seemingly simple but really important hygiene actions like careful hand washing,” said Dr. David Blythe, Maryland’s state epidemiologist.
