Oct 18, 2007 9:42 am US/Central
'Superbug' Infections Reported Across Chicago Area
2 Naperville Football Players Among Those Recently Diagnosed With MRSA
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
It's being called a staph bacterium that is resistant to most drugs. At least four Chicago-area students have recently been diagnosed with the infection.
CBS 2's Dana Kozlov reports one young victim is currently fighting for his life after coming down with an infection.
"When I got here they were telling me they didn't think he was going to pull through this," Clarissa Love said.
Her 13-year-old son, Tony, has been in intensive care at the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital since late September. The Midlothian student is battling a very virulent and drug-resistant staph infection commonly called MRSA.
"He's in … a lot of pain," Love said of her son.
Love believes it started with a cut on Tony's elbow, then spread throughout his entire body -- resulting in 13 surgeries and more to come.
"It's in his bones now, so they had to go back in there, the same incisions that they made and they had to drill holes in his bones."
Tony's 6-year-old cousin, Tajah, now has a less serious strain of MRSA, too.
Two freshman football players at Naperville North High School have been diagnosed with the same kind of "superbug" staphylococcus infection that left a student in Virginia dead, school officials said in a letter to parents Thursday.
The students were both diagnosed with MRSA infections, the letter said. The situation was reported to the DuPage County Department of Public Health, and the school has ordered students diagnosed with MRSA to stay home unless given a release by a doctor.
A school representative said the students were not in the hospital Thursday, but were receiving outpatient treatment by their primary care physicians.
MRSA, short for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is spread by direct contact. The school is advising proper hand washing, as well as washing of clothes and equipment, keeping cuts and abrasions clean and dressed with a dry bandage, and not sharing personal items such as combs, towels, water bottles or deodorant.
The school also plans to "superclean" locker and athletic rooms, along with athletic equipment that may be shared, the letter said.
The Naperville case is the latest in several reported across the country, one of which has led to a student's death and the shutdown of an entire school system.
Classes were canceled on Wednesday at the 21 schools in Bedford County, Virginia, following the death of a high school student who was diagnosed with MRSA. Ashton Bonds, a 17-year-old senior at the county's Staunton River High School, died Monday.
On Thursday, officials announced that at least two Connecticut high school students have been diagnosed with a potentially deadly infection, and crews have been cleaning a high school locker room and gym in Richmond, Indiana, after a student developed an infection. Officials are treating it as if it's the strain that was blamed for the death of a Virginia high school senior.
Published reports say about 30 percent of the population carry MRSA on their skin or in their nasal passages, and the bacterium can be carried without causing disease.
But more than 90,000 Americans get potentially deadly infections each year from a drug-resistant staph "superbug," which in the past was only associated with hospitals, the government reported Tuesday in its first overall estimate of invasive disease caused by the germ.
Deaths tied to these infections may exceed those caused by AIDS, said one public health expert commenting on the new study.
"We're not exactly sure why it is spreading and why it is spreading so fast, but in the past decade it's spread explosively," said Dr. Michael David of the University of Chicago Hospitals.
"There is an increasing number of patients that are acquiring it from the community – both invasive and noninvasive," said Dr. Rashmi Chugh of the DuPage County Health Department. "Invasive is the more serious infection when it goes beyond a pimple or a boil caused by MRSA and goes on to cause in an infection in, say, the bloodstream."
Chugh said fortunately, most MRSA cases are still sensitive to some kind of drug, so there are treatment options in the arsenal.
"We at the CDC are very concerned about these infections," sad Dr. John A Jernigan of the Centers for Disease Contro. "We are talking about 90,000 infections every year in the U.S. and of those, almost 19,000 are associated with death."
Jeanine Thomas fought the "superbug" herself and barely lived to talk about it.
"I went into multiple organ failure, had many surgeries and was in the hospital almost a month," Thomas said. "And ended up being sickened for about six months."
Love believes her son will pull through. But she knows his fight is far from over.
"I have to be strong for him," she said.
A spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Public Health says schools are not required to notify parents if a student is diagnosed with MRSA. Doctors and hospitals are also not required to report MRSA cases to the state, so it's unclear exactly how many cases there have been in Illinois.
CBS 2's Dana Kozlov, Mike Puccinelli and Kristyn Hartman contributed to this report.cbs2chicago.com's Most Popular Pages
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