Research news: Rx-resistant superbug deadlier than AIDS

The News:
Rx-resistant superbug deadlier than AIDS
By Rob Stein The Washington Post
Article Last Updated: 10/16/2007 11:49:05 PM MDT
WASHINGTON — A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public-health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported Tuesday.
The microbe, a strain of a once-innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated.
Although evidence has been mounting that the infection is becoming more common, the estimate published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association marks the first national assessment of the toll from the insidious pathogen, officials said.
"This is the first study that's been able to capture the data in a comprehensive fashion," said Scott Fridkin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC. "This is a significant public-health problem. We should be very worried."

The Research:
Read the research behind this story in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).