DENVER, CO — February 7, 2006 — In the first study of how methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus affects patients co-infected with human inmmunodeficiency virus in the United States, researchers were able to pinpoint individuals at risk of complicated MRSA bloodstream infections.
In a poster presentation here February 6th at the 13th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI), Matthew Burkey, a fourth year medical student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, reported that previous studies of HIV and MRSA had been performed only in Europe.
Between 2000 and 2003, he identified 60 patients with HIV and bloodstream MRSA and matched them with 240 HIV-infected patients who also had MRSA but did not progress to have a bloodstream infection.
“The greatest risk of having that MRSA infection spread to the blood occurred in HIV-infected patients with CD-4 positive cells counts below 50 cells/mm3,” said Burkey. Compared with patients who had higher CD4-positive cells counts, the risk of suffering bacteremia was 25 times greater in the patients with the lower CDE-4 counts. That difference was statistically significant at the P <.05 level.
Technorati Tags: HIV, MRSA, infections, bacteriemia
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