Meanwhile, MRSA...

OUT OF AFRICA for a moment.

Remember the article, written by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and published online in Annals of Internal Medicine in January 2008, about methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections among San Francisco residents, particularly among men who have sex with men?

Anyway, that article led to a lot of buzz about MRSA, San Francisco, and gay men in the media locally (San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area Reporter), nationally (New York Times, which also ran this follow up), and internationally (BBC).

Today Annals published a letter to the editor that colleagues and I wrote in response to that article, along with the authors' reply. The letter, with the not-too-pithy title "Does Ascertainment Bias Affect Reports on the Incidence of Multidrug-Resistant, Community-Associated Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Infection?", is available here if you have full-text access to Annals; if not, here's the version that was previously published online as a "Rapid Response" on the Annals webpage. The authors' reply is available here.

Here's some background on ascertainment bias.

I won't bias your reading of the letter or the reply. But you can let me know what you think.

In the meantime, also check out the editorial on MRSA that accompanied the original article in Annals (but was unfortunately published only a couple of days after the original article). Finally, you can find some good MRSA-related resources for the public and for health-care providers from the San Francisco Department of Public Health (SFDPH) here and here. One of those resources is a Frequently Asked Questions postcard that SFDPH made with the STOP AIDS Project; an image of the front of that postcard (the business side is on the reverse) accompanies this posting.