MRSA has left the building (or at least is on its way)

There's a study in the September 2010 ICHE which shows surveillance data from the Washington, DC VA Medical Center. Every MRSA clinical isolate was categorized as hospital- or community-acquired from 2001-2007. The authors noted a 41% decrease in hospital-acquired MRSA, with a simultaneous four-fold increase in community-acquired MRSA during the 7-year period. As we have noted many times before, quasi-experimental studies such as this one can be plagued with confounding and bias. However, in this study what I think is most important is irrefutable: no active surveillance for MRSA was performed during the study period.