Staph is 'cockroach of bacteria,' CDC chief tells Congress

WASHINGTON — Drug-resistant staph infections that have made headlines in recent weeks come from what the nation's top doctor calls "the cockroach of bacteria" — a bad germ that can lurk in lots of places, but not one that should trigger panic.

"This isn't something just floating around in the air," Dr. Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told members of Congress on Wednesday.

It takes close contact — things like sharing towels and razors, or rolling on the wrestling mat or football field with open scrapes, or not bandaging cuts — to become infected with the staph germ called MRSA outside of a hospital, she said.

But MRSA is preventable largely by commonsense hygiene, Gerberding stressed.

"Soap and water is the cheapest intervention we have, and it's one of the most effective," she told a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

At issue is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a form of the incredibly common staph family of germs.

About one in every three people carries staph aureus in their noses. In about 1 million people, the type they carry is MRSA.

"I like to think of it as the cockroach of bacteria," Gerberding said, pointing out MRSA's ability to live on various surfaces and spread by catching a ride on an unwashed hand.

Over time, germs evolve to withstand treatment. Most staph is no longer treatable by the granddaddy of antibiotics, penicillin. By the 1960s, staph also began developing resistance to a second antibiotic, methicillin.

So MRSA is not a new problem. What is new is public anxiety about it.

MRSA mostly causes skin infections, such as boils and abscesses. But it can sometimes spread to cause life-threatening blood infections. Last month, the CDC reported the first national estimate of serious MRSA infections — 94,000 a year. It's not clear how many people die, but one estimate put the MRSA death toll at more than 18,000, slightly higher than U.S. deaths from AIDS.

There are two distinct strains of MRSA, a type spread in hospitals and other health facilities and a genetically different type spread in communities. The vast majority of victims are hospital patients; only 14 percent of serious MRSA infections are the kind spread in the community.