Labs Should Report Staph Infections, Health Department Says
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The city’s health department wants laboratories in New York City to report cases of antibiotic-resistant staph infections, according to a proposal outlined yesterday.
The current health code does not require the reporting of Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, or MRSA, a skin infection that has made headlines in recent weeks after a number of students nationwide became infected.
MRSA was linked to the death of a 17-year-old in Virginia last week.
The city’s proposal would place the burden of automatic, electronic reporting on laboratories, not doctors.
“We’ve been investigating and looking into MRSA,” the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, said. “We can’t really track the trends without reporting.”
