Effect on MRSA transmission of rapid PCR testing of patients admitted to critical care

Effect of Screening for Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Carriage by Polymerase Chain Reaction on the Duration of Unnecessary Preemptive Contact Isolation

“…8 Our study is the first, to our knowledge, to evaluate the impact of screening known MRSA carriers at hosptial readmission by qPCR, instead of in vitro culture, in acute care medicine wards, and the result was a reduction of a median of 4 isolation-days per patient and a reduction in related costs for previous MRSA carriers who tested negative at readmission.…”

MRSA Colonization and Risk of Infection in the Neonatal and Pediatric ICU: A Meta-analysis

“…This observed breakthrough acquisition of MRSA could be explained by the 48-hour turn-around time of culture for MRSA isolation, which results in delays in implementation of infection control measures. 53,54 Suboptimal application of such measures also remains a possibility. Of note is that because we did not have enough data to study the time trends of the acquisition rate, we cannot estimate the impact of such measures over time.…”

Detection and simultaneous confirmation of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus by an automated Real-Time PCR method with strain differentiation by analysis of DNA melting curve characteristics

“…This allows the isolation and treatment of MRSA affected patients and hence is critical for the prevention of MRSA outbreaks. A study by Cunningham et al, [25] demonstrated a reduction in the transmission of MRSA incidence from 13.9/1,000 patient days (under culture method) to 4.9/1,000 patient days under PCR screening. Additionally, the PCR method used in this study required only four hours of staff training with minimal expertise required to perform the assay An obvious limitation of this study is the low number of positive MRSA samples collected from volunteers.…”