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Drug-resistant bacteria are a growing problem all over the country and Blount County is no different.

Invasive Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is the third most common disease that is required to be reported to the Tennessee Department of Health when it is diagnosed. It is behind only gonorrhea and Chlamydia, said DOH Infectious Disease Physician Dr. Marion Kainer.

MRSA has developed a resistance to certain powerful antibiotics that usually kill staph infections, and that makes it a big problem. Invasive MRSA is a diagnosis where the bacteria have entered the blood stream, brain fluid, bones or joints.

Regular MRSA usually presents itself as a puss-filled infection on a person’s skin.

MRSA isn’t lethal in its non-invasive form, but an infection can turn invasive if left untreated.

Invasive MRSA has a mortality rate of between 30 and 60 percent. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a picture of health — if you get invasive MRSA the numbers are the same for people with strong immune systems and weakened ones.

“You can be a completely healthy person and get really, really sick with it,” Kainer said. “This is a bug which even if you are a very young healthy active, say footballer, you can be really, really sick with it and you could potentially die from it.

“In terms of once you have it, if it’s invasive MRSA, it can be really devastating, even for healthy people.”

There were 2,000 cases of invasive MRSA reported to the DOH last year. That number represents an estimated 10 percent of the total MRSA infections in the state, Kainer said, explaining that it is impossible to require health care facilities to report every MRSA infection aside from the invasive cases.

The big issue is that the number of MRSA cases each year, invasive and not, is increasing.

“In terms of its public health impact, it is a very important public health problem,” Kainer said. “It is a pretty serious problem.”

Tennessee has seen a 5 to 10 percent increase in invasive MRSA cases each year for the past several years, Kainer said. Community acquired MRSA is still a bit of an unknown — doctors aren’t entirely sure how they people get it outside of a hospital.

But one thing researchers to know is that MRSA is transmitted by touch, and that makes places like hospitals and nursing homes an easy place for the bug to move around.

“In the health care setting there is transmission going on usually from patient to patient vie the hands or clothing of health care workers,” she said.

And that is where Blount Memorial Hospital has stepped up and helped change the tide of MRSA infections, at least in Blount County.

According to Kainer, BMH’s active surveillance and contact precautions have not just lowered the number of MRSA cases at the hospital. The things they are doing have become a model for other hospitals and have improved MRSA numbers for the entire county.

“Not only have they put it into practice, but they’ve also had a huge impact,” she said.

Blount Memorial has managed to see a 70 percent drop in the number of invasive MRSA cases that start in a health-care setting.

BMH Infection Control Director Sherry Hillis said the hospital was very proud of the strides it has made in fighting MRSA. The big focus was on fighting MRSA that is acquired by a patient visiting a hospital for a different ailment. If MRSA gets into the bloodstream through surgical sites, it can become invasive very easily.

“You don’t want anybody to get an MRSA infection,” Hillis said. “But those when it gets in sterile body sites or in the blood, then it’s just such a big concern.”

To stem the MRSA outbreak, the hospital took extra precautions by taking culture samples from high-risk patients and by wearing gowns and gloves whenever coming in contact with them.

That helped identify who may be carrying MRSA and ensured that it would not spread easily.

Granted, there is no way to completely stop MRSA infections, even the invasive ones. But to make sure that the vast majority of the invasive MRSA cases aren’t given to people by health care facilities, that is really important Hillis said.

“We are not giving it to them here and we are not making them sicker and that’s the goal there for inside a hospital,” she said. “A patient comes in the hospital to get well. You certainly don’t want to give them a hospital or health care acquired infection or associated infection.

“And that is something that we constantly monitor and when we get one it’s a big deal.”

To put BMH’s efforts in context, of the 11 Tennessee counties that have a population of 100,000 or more, all of them saw stagnant MRSA numbers or an increase except for Blount County. And Kainer said that can be directly traced back to Blount Memorial Hospital’s prevention programs.

“Which just shows the dramatic impact that in intervention at one hospital can have, that I can see on a statewide basis what their trend is,” she said. “You can’t necessarily prevent every single (MRSA infection), but they’re at the absolute forefront in preventing infection.

“I’m am so proud of them.”