For Kerri Cardello McKoy, mother of four, a trip to the hospital to treat a broken nose in 2003 seemed routine. But what followed wasn't: a raging MRSA infection that cost her both legs below the knee, a collapsed lung and four months in a hospital bed, much of it in a drug-induced coma.
"When I think about it, it makes me want to cry," she says.
Almost five years later, public health officials, hospitals and legislators are still arguing over the best way to curb MRSA, the drug-resistant bug that cost the Annapolis woman her legs and could be killing up to 19,000 people a year nationwide.
Experts can't agree on whether hospitals are doing enough to address the growing number of MRSA infections - or whether government should make them take action.
Advocates say the recent defeat of two MRSA bills in Annapolis leaves thousands of hospital and nursing home patients more vulnerable to the deadly pathogen.
"It doesn't make any sense. The data, the science, the evidence, everything we know about this says that we have to act now," said Michael Bennett, who as director of the Coalition for Patients Rights has fought unsuccessfully for MRSA legislation in Maryland for three years.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA's official name) is a bacterium that can live harmlessly in the skin or nasal cavities but attacks wounds and causes life-threatening infections, including pneumonia and blood poisoning.
Over the years, it has evolved into a superbug that resists the most common antibiotics. Random testing in Chicago hospitals has shown that about 10 percent of patients are positive for MRSA when they're admitted.
The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has identified at least 12 subtypes of MRSA, including a new variant - at large in the community - that killed a Virginia youth last fall and can spread in gyms, locker rooms and community settings.
Last fall, CDC researchers estimated that MRSA could kill more than 19,000 people a year in the United States. Their report, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed Baltimore with the highest infection rate of nine regions studied - but experts noted that Baltimore was also the most urbanized region.
The 8,987 cases of invasive MRSA that CDC discovered translated to 31.8 cases per 100,000 people. That was about twice as high as the previous estimate, with infection rates highest among people older than 65 (127.7 per 100,000) and African-Americans (66.5 per 100,000). Of those infected, almost 1,600 died, about 18 percent.
