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...here's what you really need to know. Yes, the latest study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that MRSA is more prevalent than any previous estimates had suggested. In the CDC's survey of nine states in 2005, there were 32 cases of MRSA infection for every 100,000 people. (By comparison, in that same year, the incidence of invasive pneumonia or flu infections ranged from less than one to 14 cases per 100,000 people.) Extrapolating from these states' statistics, the researchers estimated that there...
...numbers may seem scary, this is the first time scientists have taken stock of the prevalence of MRSA in the U.S. "We are not interpreting these numbers as a rise in MRSA, because nothing like this has ever been done before," says Monina Klevens, a medical epidemiologist at CDC and lead author of the study. "It's a baseline against which we can compare future numbers. With the increased concern about community outbreaks of MRSA, we wanted to know how widespread the infections...
...some way, but no single agency is tasked with tracking and managing the risks. "Several agencies have a need to know the number and the location of these labs to support their missions," says Rhodes, but no agency actually has this information. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has primary responsibility for monitoring the use of select agents - but according to critics, it's working with an outdated list. The last revision to the list occurred in 2005, with the addition of the re-created influenza virus that killed some 40 million people in 1918. Still missing from...
Lack of oversight means lack of policing, which often leads to underreporting of potentially fatal accidents. Labs are required by law to report mishaps with select agents immediately to the CDC, but that doesn't always happen. Case in point: Last year, a bio-lab worker at Texas A&M University became infected with the deadly brucellosis virus. The university did not report the case and may never have admitted it if an industry gadfly, Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project, had not persuaded a local district attorney to strong-arm the university into giving up its internal records...
Responding to intense criticism, the CDC is looking into forming external peer review panels to re-examine select-agent regulations and lab-safety procedures. The agency may also modify reporting requirements - possibly allowing some measure of anonymity, for example, to minimize disincentives for revealing accidents. "This is a relatively young program [which] is providing much improved oversight, but clearly there is more than we can do," says Richard Besser, director for the CDC's Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response, who defends the recent lab expansion in the U.S., saying it will lead to better diagnostics and make...