LONDON: Doctors have reported an alarming number of MRSA patients being attacked by a life threatening flesh-eating infection in the US.

The patients seem to have caught a new form of the notorious “superbug” outside hospital. Several developed complications and needed lengthy stays in intensive care and reconstructive surgery.

The doctors, who identified 14 such patients during 15 months at their medical centre in Los Angeles County, California, warn in the New England Journal of Medicine that clinicians may not recognise that necrotising fasciitis, as the flesh eating condition is properly known, can be caused by MRSA.

That could mean patients not being given the appropriate treatment, even in areas where MRSA is endemic, since such attacks, which destroy the fatty tissue underneath the skin, are normally caused by a different bug.

Although the cases still seem only to have occurred in one place, they are the latest bad news about MRSA to emerge from the US, where infections seemingly acquired outside hospital are now a common and serious problem.

They often involve the skin, especially in children, and may mean that people need hospital treatment.

People who have been in jail, have attended gay massage parlours or been involved in close contact sport are among those in other countries who have developed MRSA outside hospitals.

Health officials in Britain, who may just be turning the tide of infection in hospitals, are desperate to ensure that the same thing does not happen here.

MRSA, forms of the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium resistant to antibiotics in the methicillin class, emerged as a problem in hospitals in the 1960s.

The bacterium exists harmlessly on the skin and in the nose of around a third of healthy people, but can cause severe life threatening infection in people whose immune system is compromised. Its effect, until it gets into the bloodstream and poisons it, is often quite localised.

The new cases involved people who had a history of drug injecting, previous MRSA infection, HIV or other conditions such as diabetes, hepatitis and cancer. Unusually, all the patients survived the necrotising fasciitis, which typically kills a third of those who develop it. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service