Pa. aims at staph infections Rendell will sign a bill today designed to reduce the spread of bacteria acquired at hospitals.

Melissa Morris is exactly the kind of frontline medical worker Gov. Rendell needs for his ambitious initiative to improve the public's health.

Morris is passionate about preventing infections. For nearly a year, the nurse manager has helped spearhead an effort inside Albert Einstein Medical Center in North Philadelphia to reduce the outbreak of infections that are resistant to antibiotics.

Hospital-acquired infections - a hot topic and one that Pennsylvania hospitals are tackling with zeal - come in various forms. The target in Morris' crosshairs is a drug-resistant germ that often accompanies patients from home to the hospital, where it infects other patients and then travels with them back into the community to do more damage.

It is a vicious cycle - and one that Rendell, in signing a new law today, says he is aiming to break, or at least slow down.

Under the new legislation, hospitals will be required to test for resistant bacteria in the highest-risk patients as well as all those admitted from nursing homes, a major source of infections. Staffers in contact with contagious people also must be tested.

Rendell knows, however, that the success of his plan depends less on government mandates than on the active engagement of health-care workers such as Morris.

He was "blown away," he said, by the culture of safety he witnessed while visiting the Veterans Affairs health-care system in Pittsburgh, which has garnered national recognition for its program to fight what is known as MRSA.

"Everyone had bought into it, from the doctors to the janitors," the governor said in an interview. "I want that same type of enthusiasm about preventing hospital-acquired infections in every hospital in Pennsylvania."

The new law pushes hospitals to meet benchmarks. It rewards - with higher reimbursements - those that improve.

Many in the Philadelphia region are already attacking the problem.

At Chester County Hospital, for example, all patients in intensive care and its cardiac-care units are screened. Extra precautions then can be taken with patients found to be "colonized" with the organisms, limiting the spread of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus.

Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacterium that often lives harmlessly on the skin or in the nose. When it gets into the body - usually through a cut or surgical incision - it can cause an infection. The result ranges from minor skin lesions to life-threatening bloodstream infections, pneumonia, or organ damage.