MRSA Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about MRSA, including details on methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, hospitals, infection, antibiotic resistance, superbugs.

Carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in children in Brazil.

Lamaro-Cardoso J, Castanheira M, de Oliveira RM, e Silva SA, Pignatari AC, Mendes RE, Pimenta FC, Andrade AL

Instituto de Patologia Tropical e Saúde Pública, Universidade Federal de Goiás, Goiânia-Goiás 74605-050, Brazil.

The extent of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) carriage in Brazilian infants is largely unknown. We evaluated the presence of MRSA nasopharyngeal (NP) carriage in 686 children younger than 5 years with respiratory tract infection (609) and meningitis (77). S. aureus was isolated in 93 (13.5%) NP specimens of which 7 (1.02%) were identified as MRSA (oxacillin MIC, >256 microg/mL) harboring SCCmec type III. The dendrogram derived from the pulsed-field gel electrophoresis gel images showed that the MRSA strains diverged from the Brazilian endemic hospital-acquired clones from 10.4% to 21.7%. Although the MRSA strains were recovered from children within the first 6 h of their admission to hospital, the presence of SCCmec type III along with the multidrug-resistant profile of the isolates raises the hypotheses that these MRSA strains may have hospital origin and are now spreading into the pediatric community as colonizing pathogens.

Published 3 April 2007 in Diagn Microbiol Infect Dis, 57(4): 467-70.
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