By Xinhua
Beijing : A new drug-resistant superbug staph is being transmitted among gay men, U.S. researchers said as quoted by media reports Wednesday.
The methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, is spreading among the gay communities outside hospitals in San Francisco, Boston, New York and Los Angeles.
The Castro district of San Francisco, which has a higher gay population in the United States, has been hardest hit, researchers said.
But the superbug was said to spread through skin to skin contact, therefore, anyone could get it.
“It is skin to skin contact, not sexual orientation, that is crucial for it to be passed on,” said a spokesperson for the Health Protection Agency.
“These multi-drug resistant infections often affect gay men at body sites in which skin to skin contact occurs during sexual activities,” said Binh Diep, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who led the study.
The bacteria can cause life-threatening and deep-tissue infections if they enter the body through a wound in the skin and only be treated with expensive, intravenous antibiotics.
Most people carry staph in their noses but community-based MRSA also can live in and around the anus and is passed between sexual partners.
Staph killed about 19,000 Americans in 2005, most of them in hospitals, according to a report published in October’s Journal of the American Medical Association.