In December 2007, I flew to Chicago to meet the team of researchers who spotted the first known cases of community-associated MRSA in the US in the mid-1990s, and who have been agitating ever since for recognition and action to beat back the rising tide of antibiotic resistance. It was grey and snowy outside their shabby suite of offices, carved out of University of Chicago’s long-replaced children’s hospital. I sat in a green-tinged conference room piled with stacks of articles while Everly Macario — a Harvard-trained ScD in public health, the daughter and sister of physicians — described how MRSA killed her toddler son Simon in less than 24 hours.
“We have no idea where he got it,” she told me. “We have no idea why he was susceptible.”
Simon Sparrow was 17 months old in April 2004, a big, sturdy child with no health problems except a touch of asthma. The day before he died, he woke up feverish and disoriented, startling his parents with a cry unlike anything they had heard from him before. It was a busy morning — his older sister had a stomach virus — but they got him to the pediatric ER, got him checked, and brought him home when doctors found nothing unusual going on.
A few hours later, Everly was working at home, watching both kids, and Simon’s breathing changed. Her husband James, a history professor, had driven a few hours away to give a speech. She called a friend who is a pediatrician, held the phone up to Simon’s nose and mouth so she could hear, and then got back on the line.
“Hang up,” her friend said. “Call 911.” [Read more…]