WASHINGTON – The deadly staph infection that killed a Montgomery County teacher Sunday didn’t originate at a local middle school, officials said Tuesday.
Herbert Hoover Middle School teacher Merry King died Sunday from complications of MRSA, methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, school officials confirmed. She had been absent from the Montgomery County school since Nov. 30 and was hospitalized last week.
King’s death is the second reported MRSA-caused death in Maryland and Virginia this year. A MRSA outbreak in Bedford County, Va., was responsible for the death of a 17-year-old male student in October.
There is no indication of where King contracted the virus, and because the disease is not reportable, there is no protocol for an investigation, officials said.
“We’ve been focused on talking to the community and with parents about what the preventative measures for the disease are,” said Mary Anderson, public information officer for Montgomery County Health and Human Services. “Because it isn’t reportable, we don’t have the mechanisms to jump right in and start an investigation.”
“We have no reason to believe that it was in any way related to Herbert Hoover Middle School,” said Brian Edwards, spokesman for Montgomery County Public Schools.
School officials said there are no plans to close the school, but precautions are being taken. Edwards also stressed that King, 49, of Silver Spring, had not been at the school since Nov. 30, and school officials were not aware that she was suffering from MRSA until a hospital visit on Dec. 8.
“We sanitized the classroom and we’ve been cleaning the common areas with a bleach solution,” Edwards said. “The health department has said that is all we need to do and that’s all that we are going to do.”
Montgomery County was hit by a MRSA outbreak earlier this year with 32 reported cases.
Schools in Anne Arundel County moved to a second type of hospital grade cleaner after an outbreak there earlier this year.
Because MRSA is not a reportable disease, there is no indication of how many cases are contracted in Maryland each year.
There are nearly 19,000 deaths from MRSA per year and 94,360 cases of the infection nationwide, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Four outbreaks occurred in Maryland this year, beginning with seven students at Sherwood High School in June.
Community-based MRSA has typically been associated with athletes, specifically football players, because of the infection’s ability to be transmitted through open wounds or through sharing equipment and supplies, including weight-training apparatus, razors or towels.
“It’s transmitted by either indirect or direct contact,” said John Jernigan, MRSA expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after the initial outbreaks in Maryland. “It’s potentially easy to transmit in that way, however it’s also pretty easy to interrupt transmission.”
The recent outbreaks in schools have caused concern that the “superbug” is moving away from hospital settings where it began, experts told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in November.
“The epicenter is no longer at the hospital,” said Robert Daum, a pediatrics professor at the University of Chicago. “The problem has now shifted to the community.”
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