Thursday, June 26, 2008

We’re under treating MRSA in hospitals

This study from Clinical Infectious Diseases demonstrated failure to prescribe an anti-MRSA agent not only empirically on day one but also after confirmatory cultures came back in a concerning number of patients with MRSA infections. Maybe we’ve been over-indoctrinated by “say no to vanco.”

Via Medscape.

3 comments:

Rural Doctoring said...

Interesting, because in my neck of the woods everyone gets started on vanc if they have an infection suspicious for staph. The bigger problem I have up here is not underutilization of vanc, but failure to convert to Ancef or oxacillin when the staph species turns out to be MSSA. Vanc is not particularly good at clearning MSSA, and I've come onto our hospitalist service more than once to find a patient who has been languishing there for over a week with MSSA and vanc hanging every 12 hours. I'm talking to our infection control about it. Maybe once MSSA is isolated, a note should go out to the doc to change antimicrobials. Some of us don't look at the MARs everyday, as we should. (I'm sure you do, Dr. RW.)

Robert W Donnell said...

An excellent point. For MSSA, ancef or oxa or nafcillin is superior to vanc.

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