How Do We Crack MRSA? Let Us Count the Cases

Over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandra Porter has a post on the news that the state of Washington is now requiring hospitals to report MRSA cases. (Yay! Perhaps with better reporting, all those genomic efforts to crack the drug-resistance issue will start to make major advances.) What really has Porter interested is the new online database that the public can use to find out a hospital's MRSA stats. While she notes that data can't be considered comprehensive at this point -- hospitals are not required to test all patients for MRSA, just to report the cases that come to their attention -- she says the effort to produce the database is "impressive" and that it may alleviate the problems that arise from institutions trying to police themselves.