Drug-resistant staph causes more pneumonia
By Ben Harder
From Boston, at a meeting of the Infectious Diseases Society of America
Last winter, a recently discovered bacterial variant became a major cause of severe pneumonia among people who caught the flu.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, has long been a menace in hospitals, where it can spread from one patient to another. Resistant to a class of penicillin-like antibiotics, MRSA causes difficult-to-treat pneumonias and infections of the skin, blood, and surgical sites.