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More about the recent CDC rules for infection control.

U.S. health officials are preparing new hospital infection control guidelines to slow the growing spread of bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotics.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will release the new hospital rules within three months, Michelle Pearson, chief of the National Center for Infectious Disease’s prevention and evaluation branch, said in an interview at an infectious disease meeting this month in Washington, D.C. The new rules will intensify sterilization requirements for health workers, increase testing of patients who may harbor dangerous germs, and may call for hospitals to create special quarantine wards.

Researchers are concerned especially about antibiotic resistant bacterial infections that arise in hospitals and spread to homes and crowded workplaces. The microbe, called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is creating a health hazard in the United States, dwarfing the threat posed by the H5N1 avian flu, said Steve Projan, vice president of protein technologies for Wyeth, the drug maker that markets the Tygacil antibiotic.

“This is a hyper-virulent virulent bug,” Projan said in a press conference at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Therapy and Antibiotics. “While we’re very concerned about H5N1, we do have in front of us today this outbreak of community-acquired MRSA.” Bacteria mutate constantly, sometimes in ways that allow them to overcome widely used antibiotics such as penicillin and methicillin. Doctors use stronger drugs, such as vancomycin, to treat the resistant infections. Other products that sometimes work against MRSA include Wyeth’s Tygacil and Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s Cubicin. Vancomycin is a generic drug sold by several companies.

About 2 million patients become infected inside U.S. hospitals each year, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Staphylococcus aureus alone accounts for about 300,000 of those infections. About 40 percent of those germs can overcome methicillin, and about 12,000 of infected patients die, according to the CDC.

Increasingly, researchers are finding these drug-resistant infections outside the hospital, leading to concerns about widespread outbreaks of hard-to-treat microbes. Episodes of drug-resistant infections have occurred in the past year on professional U.S. football teams, including the St. Louis Rams, Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers, said Dan Jernigan, chief of CDC’s epidemiology branch at the National Center for Infectious Diseases. Infections have been seen among newborns in nurseries, he said.

The new threat of community-acquired MRSA’s has heightened doctors’ concerns about drug-resistant staph.

In some hospitals in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the new toxic strain is the leading cause of drug-resistant staph infections. More than half the MRSA’s at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center are the community-acquired strain, according to a study presented Dec. 17 by Cynthia Maree, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles Geffen School of Medicine.

“That’s more than twice the rate we had in 1999,” she said in an interview at the conference. “When patients make repeat trips to the hospital with the same strain, health workers will sometimes clean the patient’s home” in an attempt to get rid of the source of infection, she said.