Drug-resistant staph common in football players
Athletes should wash their hands (and dirty gym clothes) often
By Nathan Seppa
PHILADELPHIA — College athletes who play contact sports are at high risk of harboring and spreading Staphylococcus microbes, including the kind resistant to a first-line antibiotic, a study finds.
Staph is a common bacterium that “colonizes” most people, meaning it lives in them unnoticed, often in the nasal passages. Even methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, colonizes at least 5 percent of people in the United States, says epidemiologist Natalia Jimenez-Truque of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Colonization increases the risk of an infection occurring if the microbes grow out of control and contributes to the spread of the microbes to others. MRSA kills up to 18,000 people per year in the United States by infecting the blood, lungs, skin and other body parts.