MRSA staph infection hits Wakefield High School

  Eyewitness News

(10/22/07 -- RALEIGH) (WTVD) -- A female Wakefield High School student was admitted to the hospital last week with an assumed MRSA infection.

According to Wake County Community Health Director Gibbie Harris, the girl was successfully treated. The student is now on antibiotics and her wound is covered. Harris says as long as the student is washing her hands and using good hygiene, she should not be contagious.

Wakefield High School Principal Mark Savage tells Eyewitness News the student has returned to school. Savage is planning to send letters home to parents Monday, detailing what happened. There is no plan to close the school or do any additional cleaning.

Gibbie Harris says closing the school only offers a false sense of security, adding "it should be perfectly safe for the student to be at school and for other students to be around her as long as they are practicing good hygiene too." Staph Infections

• one type resistant to standard antibiotics (MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus)
• could kill more Americans each year than AIDS (AIDS killed an estimated 17,011 Americans in 2005)
• more than 90,000 Americans sickened by it annually.
• 17-year-old Virginia high school senior died Monday
• doctors say infection spread to his kidneys, liver, lungs and muscles around his heart

• 31.8 per 100,000 rate of invasion
• invades bloodstream or destroys flesh
• bacteria can be carried by healthy people
• lives on skin or in noses
• can be deadly when spreads inside the body
• MRSA has become more common in hospitals
• has been spreading through prisons, gyms, locker rooms, poor urban neighborhoods
• about one-quarter of invasive cases involved patients in hospitals
• more than half were related to health-care, occurring in people who had recently had surgery or were on kidney dialysis
• major methods of spreading through open wounds, exposure to contaminated medical equipment
• 988 reported deaths among infected people in the study, for a rate of 6.3 per 100,000
• study rate would translate to 18,650 deaths annually (researchers don't know if MRSA was the cause in all cases)

• curbing overuse of antibiotics
• improving hand-washing and other hygiene procedures, especially among hospital workers
• some hospitals cut infections by isolating new patients until they are screened for MRSA
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