The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on April 3 reported the first case of vanomycin resistance involving the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, the most common cause of skin infections in the United States. Vanomycin has been considered the most reliable drug for treating these infections, which have long demonstrated resistance to other traditional first-line drug treatments. Nearly all strains of S. aureus in the U.S. are resistant to penicillin and by the 1970s, methicillin-resistant S. aureus had emerged and spread in health care settings. CDC estimates roughly 41% of the 290,000 people hospitalized each year are infected with methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). In the past five years, community-associated MRSA disease has been recognized in people without exposures to the health care setting or previous infection with MRSA, spurring the widespread use of vanomycin as the preferred treatment. "Although the infection in the patient in this first case was treatable with other antibiotics, these findings remind us of the need for infection control and judicious use of antibiotics in the health care setting to prevent antibiotic resistance," said CDC Director Julie Gerberding, M.D. The study is described in the April 3 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. For more on CDC's efforts to prevent antimicrobial resistance, go to http://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance. ?