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+Flu | November 8, 2011

Study: H1N1 Can Be Deadly Even for Healthy Kids

By Meredith Melnick

Flu prevention is important for everyone, but here’s another reason to make sure to get vaccinated: in a study of childhood flu deaths from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, researchers found that otherwise healthy kids can succumb to the virus, particularly if they’ve already got an increasingly common bacterial infection.

+Prevention | September 23, 2011

Bacteria Show Up in Hospital Rooms, Again

By Sora Song
Silverstock / Getty Images

We get it — hospitals are crawling with germs. If it’s not your cell phone, the doctor’s coat or even the hands-free water faucet, then it’s the privacy curtain around the bed that’s tainted with unwanted bacteria.

+Infectious Disease | August 15, 2011

MRSA Is on the Rise Among Children: Could Antibiotics Be to Blame?

By Meredith Melnick
Center for Disease Control / Getty Images

Severe skin infections are increasing among children and becoming one of the most common reasons for hospitalization, a new study finds.

+Infectious Disease | July 15, 2011

Coffee and Tea Drinkers May Be Less Susceptible to MRSA

By Laura Blue
Creative Crop

Coffee and tea drinkers could be at lower risk of a developing a deadly drug-resistant staph infection, new research suggests.

+Infectious Disease | June 3, 2011

Watch Out for the Cows. They Might Be Carrying a New Strain of MRSA

By Bryan Walsh
Photo Illustration by Alexander Ho for TIME; Cow: Getty Images

The medical news this week has been dominated by the possible carcinogenicity of cell phones and the virulent E. coli outbreak in Europe. But I hope your closet of fear isn’t full yet — I’ve got one more bit of medical worry to stuff in it.

+Numbers | June 1, 2011

40%

Percentage of cell phones belonging to hospital patients or patients' visitors that tested positive for potentially disease-causing bacteria, compared with 21% of health-care workers' cell phones, according to a study conducted by microbiologists at Inonu University in Malatya, Turkey, who swabbed a total of 200 mobile phones. Seven of the 133 phones of patients and [...]

+Infectious Disease | May 12, 2011

Thought Bedbugs Were Bad? Try Bedbugs With MRSA

By Meredith Melnick
Getty Images

(Updated) The one bright side to having bedbugs — if you wanted to be optimistic about it — has always been that at least the tormenting critters didn’t transmit disease. But now researchers in Vancouver report that they’ve found bedbugs with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

+Infectious Disease | May 9, 2011

Do I Have MRSA? FDA Approves Superbug Diagnostic Test

By Meredith Melnick
PASIEKA/SPL via Getty Images

A newly approved diagnostic test can rapidly identify whether a patient’s Staphylococcus aureus infection is resistant to commonly prescribed antibiotics.

+Safety | April 20, 2011

Hand Sanitizers That Prevent MRSA? Not So Fast

By Sora Song
safe4hours

(Updated) On Wednesday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it had sent warning letters to four makers of hand sanitizing products that claim to prevent infection from methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

+Food & Drink | April 15, 2011

What’s Lurking in Your Meat and Poultry? Probably Staph

By Alice Park
Hisham Ibrahim

It’s a kitchen credo that you should wash your hands and utensils thoroughly, especially after they’ve touched raw meat or poultry, which may contain a host of bacteria — salmonella, listeria, E. coli — that can make you sick. Now add a new pathogen to the list.