People struggling to get rid of recurrent staph infections may want to consider an often-overlooked source: the family pet.
A German woman repeatedly battled the same strain of drug-resistant superbug MRSA until her cat was tested and treated. It’s one of the few documented cases of transmission of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus between a person and a cat.
Dr. Andreas Sing, a microbiologist at the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority in Oberschleissheim, near Munich, said the woman’s husband and two children carried the MRSA germ on skin but had no signs of infection. After they were treated, the woman was still being re-infected.
Four weeks after the apparently healthy cat was treated with antibiotics, the woman was free of MRSA, Sing wrote in a brief report in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
