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Should we really fear 'new flesh-eating bacteria'?

NHS Choices Behind the Headlines, 2012

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Britain is in the grip of a new “flesh-eating bug spread by sneezes and coughs”, according to the front page of today’s Metro .
The newspaper says that the bacteria are spreading across Britain, as they can be caught through people coughing and sneezing on crowded trains and buses.
This unsettling news put some of the Behind the Headlines team off grabbing their free copy of the Metro  at the station this morning, not because of the fear of catching deadly germs from the paper, but because its report was alarmist and overblown.
The basis of this news is a laboratory study that investigated why healthcare-acquired meticillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus ( ) bacteria rarely cause infections in healthy individuals.
The study found that healthcare-acquired MRSA has a high level of antibiotic resistance, but that this property comes at a cost of reduced virulence (being less able to cause infection).
Conversely, the study found that the type of MRSA that is usually caught in a community setting is more virulent, but weaker against treatment with antibiotics.
This study has not investigated the transmission, effects or number of cases of community-acquired MRSA in the UK, which formed the basis of many news reports on the research.
The researchers state that MRSA outside the healthcare system and in the community is a growing concern, but cases are still very rare.
This interesting research contributes to our knowledge of MRSA, rather than warning us of a germ-based Armageddon.
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Bath and the University of Nottingham in the UK; University College Dublin in Ireland; and Texas A&M Health Science Centre and the University of Texas in the US.