Deadly Superbugs

They can be transmitted by a hug or a handshake, on a playground or in a locker room. And can kill within 72 hours.

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Full of Life

Drew Griggs was full of energy on January 31, 2005, as he headed to the gym. The 16-year-old was a starting kicker on his Dublin, Georgia, high school football team, the Fighting Irish. But the gridiron season was over, and it would be fun to join his friends for a Monday night pickup basketball game. After shooting hoops for a while, he went home feeling a little ill and told his parents, Bonnie and Paul, that he might be coming down with the flu. Although the brawny young athlete wasn't one to complain, his mom checked his temperature. It was 99. Nothing to worry about. He'd probably be fine in a day or two.

On Wednesday, Drew woke up with a stuffy nose, a cough and a mild fever. He stayed home from school. In the afternoon, while Bonnie was picking up her son's homework, her cell phone rang. "Mom, I can't breathe," Drew gasped. "Dad's taking me to the doctor." Bonnie rushed to the MD's office, where an x-ray showed that the teenager's lungs were congested. Suspecting pneumonia, the doctor sent the family to the ER, where doctors slipped an oxygen mask over Drew's face. When that didn't help, he was transferred by ambulance to a larger hospital, in Macon, Georgia, while Bonnie and Paul followed in their car.

"I thought they'd give him antibiotics, and that would fix it," says Bonnie, a physical education teacher. At the second hospital, doctors tried one treatment after another, with no success. At 1:30 a.m., they had to put Drew on a respirator. But even on life support, his oxygen level kept dropping. By morning, it was so dangerously low that there was only one option left: moving him to a medical center in Atlanta to be hooked up to a heart-lung bypass machine. "When we saw him at the third hospital, he'd started to turn blue. They gave him a 30 percent chance of living, because his lungs were shutting down from extreme infection," says Bonnie. "That hit us so hard, we were in complete shock."

But why was Drew so sick? Tests, including cultures of his phlegm, revealed that he had pneumonia triggered by a sometimes fatal bacterial infection known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). "I thought only sick people in the hospital got that," says Bonnie. For decades, that was true: MRSA was dubbed a superbug because many common antibiotics couldn't eradicate it. The bug prowled medical centers and nursing homes, typically targeting elderly, debilitated and chronically ill patients. Now an even more dangerous form of staph infection, known as community-associated MRSA (CA-MRSA), is striking otherwise healthy people who haven't been in a hospital, with an unusual number of outbreaks among athletes on sports teams. And kids are at particular risk, although no one is sure why.

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