Universal Screening For MRSA Does Not Reduce Infections – JAMA Study
This article was originally published in The Gray Sheet
Executive Summary
Using a rapid molecular assay to screen all surgical patients on admission for a prevalent drug-resistant infection did not reduce the incidence of hospital-acquired infections in a Swiss study involving more than 20,000 patients
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Universal MRSA screening
Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, a Chicago-area hospital system, decreased its methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection rate by 69.6% (from 8.9 hospital-acquired infections per 10,000 patient-days to 3.9) in two years of implementing universal screening for MRSA in all hospital admissions, according to a recent study. Published March 18 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the results compare favorably to a Swiss study that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association the previous week, showing no benefit from universal MRSA screening (1"The Gray Sheet" March 17, 2008, p. 13). Ebbing Lautenbach, University of Pennsylvania, notes in an accompanying AIM editorial that it is still premature for all hospitals to adopt universal screening, since the relative contribution of the test and concurrent interventions remains unclear. Evanston Northwestern uses BD's GeneOhm rapid molecular MRSA test