Despite the recent death of a Virginia teenager from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and the diagnosis of six North Carolina high school football players with the infection, Duke remains calm about the resilient superbug.
Duke health administrators said the extensive media coverage of MRSA has made the infection seem more serious than it really is.
The main cause for concern over MRSA-a variant of the common staph bacterium-is its resistance to penicillin and other antibiotics commonly used to treat staph infections, said Dr. William Purdy, executive director of the Student Health Center. The excitement in recent news reports about MRSA has been exaggerated, and it is treatable with antibiotics other than penicillin, he added.
"MRSA has been a 'known about' concern for the last few years," Franca Alphin, director of health promotion at the Student Health Center wrote in an e-mail. "It just received a lot of press this year."
This strain has long affected hospitalized patients who had surgeries and is now affecting healthy individuals who have not been hospitalized, which is known as community-associated MRSA, Purdy said.
Although community-associated MRSA is fairly new, Duke has treated the infection for the past two to three years and observed six documented cases of culture-proven MRSA this year, he added.
Student Health is now taking more precautions to address MRSA as well, Alphin said. Informational posters concerning MRSA have been up in athletic facilities since last year because of the high risk of the bacteria spreading in those areas, she added.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2005 that MRSA is spread most commonly through crowded living conditions, close skin contact, contaminated items and open wounds.
The posters, which advise good hygiene like washing hands and cleaning wounds, are now being distributed to resident assistants on East and West campuses to be put up in the residence halls, Alphin said.
Freshman Ahmad Jitan said he has not heard about MRSA recently, although he said he is aware of staph infections and practices good hygiene regularly.
"I already use hand sanitizers whenever I return to my dorm room to stay clean," he said. "And I wash my hands frequently, so I'm not too worried."
During the last six months, Student Health has given the necessary antibiotics to anyone who comes to the Student Health Center with a skin infection to treat staph, Purdy said.
"Everybody that comes in with an abscess-which is a pocket of pus-we will drain it and send the bacteria off to the lab to make sure we know exactly what it is and if we're treating it with the right medication," he added.
MRSA enters the cells and kills them, Purdy said. "It can get into your lungs and cause staph pneumonia and staph septicemia so it's just a very, very nasty bacteria."
Freshman Rachel Willcutts said she became more careful about hygiene after hearing about MRSA from her professor, but is not letting it bother her too much.
"Knowing about it, it is a little scary, but you can't live your life with the fear of the building caving in on you," she said.
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