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News about MRSA infections in Triad schools drew headlines this week. Six East Forsyth football players were reported infected as was a student at Northeast Guilford High School. Those reports followed the news that nationally three children have died from methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus recently.

Drug-resistant staph infections aren't rare. Moses Cone Health System reports it dealt with more than 800 MRSA infections the first seven months of 2007: 467 outpatient cases and 332 identified when the patient was hospitalized. What brought the recent infections to national attention is a just-published study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. It found that serious MRSA infections are more widespread in the United States than had been realized: They likely result in some 19,000 deaths annually — more than the number of Americans who die from AIDS each year. Despite this, there is no need to panic. But there is a need for education and action at all levels — national to local.

MRSA is treatable. The infection can range from a superficial pimple to a serious infection of the bloodstream. While resistant to penicillin and other drugs, it can be treated by some antibiotics. About 82 percent of those who contract the most serious form of MRSA survive, the new study found.

MRSA is preventable. Some say rates can be cut 90 percent. Indeed, many European countries have much lower rates than the United States because they aggressively deal with it.

The first step in MRSA prevention is for public health departments to keep tabs on it. There is now no national requirement that MRSA statistics be kept. That must change. North Carolina is making a step in the right direction; a new state law has established a commission to help hospitals and other institutions collect MRSA stats.

Hospitals will need to play a central role in prevention and education efforts. Fortunately, for Greensboro, the Moses Cone Health System is doing this. In March, it made fighting MRSA a priority. Part of its program is an aggressive hand-hygiene campaign, which involves trained observers monitoring for compliance. In August those observers found that 98 percent of staff followed rules about cleaning hands. (Studies have found that less than 50 percent of staff in U.S. hospitals appropriately clean hands.) Cone also is aggressively cleaning equipment and marking it and assessing patients for MRSA when admitted.

MRSA is frightening. Cone reports that in the last few years MRSA infections have increased from 4 percent of the staph they encounter to 63 percent. Maybe now, with national attention focused on the infection, those numbers will start to come down.