This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Bacterial Infections  • Drug Therapy, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In reply

We read with interest the comments from Dias and colleagues. As described in our article, we prospectively included all admitted patients during a 5-year period (1998-2002).¹ An infection control program was introduced 1 year after the beginning of the study to evaluate the effect of a comprehensive intervention on the annual incidence of MRSA recovered from any body site during hospital stay. As part of the control program, MRSA carriers were decolonized and examined during subsequent follow-up visits to determine the success rate of the decolonization procedure, the ongoing part of the study. Thus, no historical controls were used, and the study has the characteristics of a prospective cohort study.²

The aim of our study was to determine whether a comprehensive MRSA control policy originally established in low-prevalence areas may be also effective and feasible in a highly endemic setting. We agree that it would be interesting to . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION
Viktorija Tomic, MD; Petra Svetina Sorli, MD; Darinka Trinkaus, MD; Jurij Sorli, MD, PhD; Andreas F. Widmer, MD, MS; Andrej Trampuz, MD

RELATED ARTICLE

Comments on a Comprehensive Strategy to Prevent Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Infections
Cícero Dias, Sandra Costa Fuchs, Rejane Oravec, Fernanda Freitag, and Luciele Shifelbain
Arch Intern Med. 2005;165(12):1437.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT