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Pneumococcal resistance to penicillin has made that venerable antibiotic virtually useless for treating community-acquired pneumonia and meningitis. The increasing prevalence of penicillin-resistant and, more recently, methicillin-resistant staphylococci has led clinicians to use vancomycin empirically for suspected staphylococcal infection. Now, the CDC has reported the first isolation of a fully vancomycin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA).
The organism was isolated in June 2002 from a vascular-catheter exit site in a 40-year-old woman with diabetes mellitus and peripheral vascular disease, who was receiving long-term hemodialysis for renal failure. For a year before VRSA was isolated, she was treated for a foot ulcer with multiple an…