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Thank you Cory for this timely report on MRSA, and also for recognizing that it is not a recent development, although now that the media is blowing the subject all out of proportion, there may be a danger of it becoming the "bug du jour". I can tell you from personal experience that beta-lactamase positive strains of Staph aureus (penicillin and ampicillin resistant) were not altogether common even 20 years ago. Jump to present-day: I have not seen a strain of S. aureus that is NOT beta-lactamase positive in some time. As for MRSA, when we would recover those in the lab, say, 5 to 10 years ago, it was not a common occurrence, and a rather big deal, especially for infection control. Now, I would say roughly 70% of the S. aureus strains we recover from the lab are MRSA. I have seen the bacteria recovered from boils, wounds, sputum, stool, blood, you name it. A big problem for the past 10 years has been that the doctors have been on the offensive rather that the defensive...
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