MRSA Notes

Seattle Weekly: News: Contagion in the Jail by Rick Anderson

County jail and health officials insist their aging 1,700-bed downtown King County Correctional Facility is safe, and they’re doing their best to keep it disease-free. But two superbugs have been discovered at the jail in the past 23 months, one of them continuously sweeping the population—and both combining to cause an inmate’s death. That’s led anxious inmates, family members, and county and city council members to suspect the jail’s health safeguards are insufficient. King County Council member David Irons considers the situation serious enough to call it “a new public health threat” for those inside and outside the facility.

The diseases are necrotizing fasciitis, better known as flesh-eating disease, and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterial infection commonly called MRSA. They led to the 2004 death of a drug user serving a short sentence for theft. (See “A Jail Shakedown,” Nov. 2.) The deceased inmate’s family blames his death in part on the jail’s negligence. It turns out that a girlfriend of that inmate, who was serving a similar sentence at the same time at the jail, died from flesh-eating disease a month later, shortly after her release. Their similar causes of death have not been previously reported. Jail officials do not see a link between the jail and the two deaths, but they never substantially investigated either case.

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