• Jon P Furuno, Eli N Perencevich, Judith A Johnson, Marc-Oliver Wright, Jessina C McGregor, J Glenn Morris, Sandra M Strauss, Mary-Claire Roghman, Lucia L Nemoy, Harold C Standiford, Joan N Hebden, and Anthony D Harris.
• Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland 21201, USA. jfuruno@epi.umaryland.edu
• Emerging Infect. Dis. 2005 Oct 1; 11 (10): 1539-44.

AbstractWe assessed the prevalence, risk factors, and clinical outcomes of patients co-colonized with vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) upon admission to the medical and surgical intensive care units (ICUs) of a tertiary-care facility between January 1, 2002, and December 31, 2003. Co-colonization was defined as a VRE-positive perirectal surveillance culture with an MRSA-positive anterior nares surveillance culture collected concurrently. Among 2,440 patients, 65 (2.7%) were co-colonized. Independent risk factors included age (odds ratio [OR] 1.03, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.01-1.05), admission to the medical ICU (OR 4.38, 95% CI 2.46-7.81), male sex (OR 1.93, 95% CI 1.14-3.30), and receiving antimicrobial drugs on a previous admission within 1 year (OR 3.06, 95% CI 1.85-5.07). None of the co-colonized patients would have been identified with clinical cultures alone. We report a high prevalence of VRE/MRSA co-colonization upon admission to ICUs at a tertiary-care hospital.

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