MRSA, or Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a bacteria that can cause serious infections.
Unfortunately, MRSA infections are becoming more common these days.
On the plus side, most of these infections are still easily treated, as long as your pediatrician puts your child on the correct antibiotic. MRSA is resistant to most of the routine antibiotics that doctors use to treat routine staph infections though.
That makes it important for your pediatrician to either make an early diagnosis of MRSA and start your child on an antibiotic that does usually work against MRSA, like Bactrim or Clindamycin, or do an MRSA test to see if the infection is being caused by the MRSA bacteria.
MRSA Tests
The main issue with MRSA tests is that they take time.
A culture is the main way that a bacteria is tested to see if it is MRSA. That involves first waiting for the bacteria to grow and identifying the bacteria, which takes 24 to 48 hours. And then, if it is indeed the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, further antibiotic susceptibility testing is done to see if it is MRSA. That can take another 24 hours.
So it can take two or three days before you know if a bacteria that is causing an infection is MRSA, which can delay the proper treatment of an infection.
New MRSA Test
The long wait for the routine MRSA test is one reason that many doctors now treat many suspicious infections as if they were MRSA, and simply use an MRSA test to confirm the diagnosis. That way, the child is already on the proper antibiotic when the bacteria is identified as MRSA.
That does mean that some children without MRSA are treated with stronger antibiotics than they need to, which raises the worry for further antibiotic resistance in the future.
A new rapid MRSA test should shorten the wait for results of MRSA testing from a few days to a few hours. The first rapid MRSA test, the BD GeneOhm StaphSR Assay, was approved by the FDA in January 2008 and can detect MRSA blood infections.
There will hopefully soon be rapid tests to identify MRSA in wound cultures too.
Sources:
FDA News Alert. FDA Clears First Quick Test For Drug-Resistant Staph Infections. January 2, 2008.
