After Dylan’s recent stay in the hospital, this week’s news that Staph infections kill more people than AIDS is scary.

U.S. deaths from staph surpass AIDS
Study shows majority of cases of drug-resistant infection originate in health settings
– Houston Chronicle

About 18,700 people die in this country each year from drug-resistant staph infections, according to a federal study released Tuesday — more deaths than the United States sees from AIDS annually.

The study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scheduled to be published in today’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first of its kind to track methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA.

Based on data from 2005, the agency estimated that about 94,400 patients nationwide suffer an invasive MRSA infection each year. And in the vast majority of cases, the infections originated in health care settings.

[snip]

The once-rare, drug-resistant germ causes more than half of all skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms, the CDC reported last year. But until now, there was no solid data on the number of cases nationwide to serve as a benchmark.

[snip]