Drug Use Percentages
The first reports of methicillin resistance in S. aureus (MRSA) began in the mid-1960s among hospitalized patients. S. aureus is a frequent cause of infection in hospitals and other healthcare facilities such as nursing homes and dialysis centers, because the people in these facilities generally have weakened immune systems. It is really no surprise that the first accounts of MRSA occurred in the healthcare environment where antibiotic pressure helped to select for a larger population of methicillin resistant S. aureus. Serious or invasive S. aureus infections were more often treated in-hospital, and most often with methicillin. Over time strains of MRSA were increasingly found as a cause of staphylococcal infection acquired in the healthcare environment.
In some geographic locations, hospital-acquired MRSA (HAMRSA) still remains low (e.g. Nova Scotia); whereas, in larger cities, the percentage of hospital-acquired staphylococcal infections caused by MRSA is much higher. In many large cities in the U.S. the proportion of S. aureus infections caused by MRSA is 60% or higher. What does this mean? If you developed infection in a surgical wound while in hospital, chances are the organism responsible would be S. aureus, because S. aureus is a major cause of nosocomial infections. AND, because the percentage of S. aureus hanging around the hospital environment are resistant to methicillin, the likelihood that the staph causing – something wrong with this sentence - your wound infection is greater than the flip of a coin if you are hospitalized in a large city in the U.S. In Mexico, some areas of South America, the Mid-East and Asia, the risk of having a wound infection due to MRSA is even greater. And hospital strains of MRSA tend to have resistance not only to methicillin, but also to multiple other antibiotics that might otherwise be useful in treating S. aureus infections.
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