Shut schools? There's no need, MRSA experts say

As news of a deadly and drug-resistant "superbug" swept across the country this month, schools faced with cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, had to make up protocol on the fly.

But closing schools — as many districts around the country did — was an overreaction, public-health officials say. Their advice is much simpler:

Kids shouldn't share towels. They should wash their hands and cover leaking wounds. Schools should report MRSA outbreaks to the health department, but closing the schools doesn't really do any good, said James Apa, a spokesman for Public Health -- Seattle & King County.

When three cases were reported in the Kent School District, district officials followed that advice: They kept schools open but scrubbed common areas and disinfected classrooms.

"An extensive wipe-down of all surfaces is nice, but I'm not sure that is going to protect anybody," said Neil Kaneshiro, a Woodinville pediatrician and president of the Washington chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

MRSA is a staph infection, usually passed from person to person, that is resistant to penicillin. Originally found mostly in hospitals, the strain has become more common among the general public. Federal health officials reported last month that MRSA kills more people per year than AIDS.

When a 17-year-old high-school student in Virginia died from a MRSA infection, school districts across the country closed doors to scrub and disinfect — and ease parental anxiety.

Earlier this month, a small school district in Arkansas closed its three schools after a single fifth-grader was hospitalized with MRSA. Doctors say the boy will be home by Christmas. Other districts across the country — in Michigan, Kansas, Washington, D.C., and suburban Chicago — closed schools for cleaning, according to newspaper reports.

Locally, Holy Rosary School in Edmonds canceled classes for almost a week after a student's parents reported that the child had an infection. After the school was professionally cleaned, it turned out the diagnosis wasn't even accurate.

After three students were diagnosed with the infection in the Port Townsend School District, the superintendent canceled the last football game of the year. The superintendent has since said that was "overkill."

And even professional cleaning doesn't take care of it entirely. Since many people carry staph, the infection returns when students do.

In the state's largest school district — where no cases have been reported so far — Seattle Public Schools' head nurse plans a much less extreme course of action to avoid an outbreak: hand-washing and Band-Aids.

"We're not talking about anything that's terribly new," said Jill Lewis, the nurse.

Information from Seattle Times archives and news researcher David Turim was used in this report. Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com

The information in this article, originally published Nov. 26, 2007, was corrected Nov. 27, 2007. The original version of the story mistakenly said that school officials should report individual MRSA cases. Schools should report MRSA outbreaks -- an outbreak means person-to-person transmission of the infection.