Control and Eradication of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus on a Surgical Unit

AFTER the appearance of sporadic cases in 1961, 1 the incidence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections in the United Kingdom, 2 Scandinavia, 3 and Europe 4 increased gradually throughout the 1960s, reaching a peak at the end of the decade before waning in the Old World. Because conventional procedures for source isolation and disinfection failed to contain their spread in most hospitals, strains of methicillin-resistant S. aureus are now endemic throughout the United States 5 , 6 and eastern Australia. 7 In the autumn of 1982 a methicillin-resistant S. aureus , phage type 29, introduced to our district general hospital from the community in the spring, caused a . . .