Written question asked by Paul Flynn (Labour), in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 19 November 1996. It was answered by Lord Horam (Conservative) on Tuesday, 19 November 1996 on behalf of the Department of Health.

Dept of Health

Question: What plans he has for making MRSA a notifiable condition; and if he will comment on the reliability of current statistics on MRSA infection and deaths.

Answer: Mr. Flynn: To ask the Secretary of State for Health what plans he has for making MRSA a notifiable condition; and if he will make a statement on the reliability of current statistics on MRSA infection and deaths. [4663] Mr. Horam: MRSA infection can take the form of many different diseases from trivial skin infections to pneumonia or septicaemia. It would be wholly impracticable to make all these diseases notifiable. Appropriate measures to control MRSA do not depend on its being notifiable. MRSA does not have a distinct code within the revision of the International Classification of Diseases used for encoding death registration data at the Office for National Statistics. Consequently, there are no centrally-held statistics on deaths from this cause. The Public Health Laboratory Service publishes aggregate data on numbers of cases of certain severe infections, some which are due to MRSA which are voluntarily reported to it by hospitals. It also publishes data derived from isolates of MRSA sent to it for specialist typing. Although these data give helpful indications of trends, it is not possible from either of these data sets to identify the total number of cases of MRSA infection.

Secondary information

Type: Written question
Reference: 4663; 285 c532-3W
Session: 1996-97
Subjects: Infectious diseases MRSA Statistics Bacterial diseases Notifiable diseases