MRSA Infection Claims Texas Rescuer; Wife Seeks Answers

It started with a nagging pain in Mike Chandler's lower back.

After 10 days of doctor visits and a fistful of prescriptions for painkillers, the 33-year-old Garland firefighter was rushed to Medical Center of McKinney, unable to breathe and showing signs of kidney failure.

It took two more days for a test to confirm that he was fighting a severe infection.

By then, Mr. Chandler was dead.

His death certificate stated simply that he died of multiple organ failure, pneumonia and sepsis, which is the body's response to an overwhelming infection. But the underlying cause of death was what his loved ones could not believe.

An antibiotic-resistant staph infection - methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA - killed a strong, healthy firefighter in less than two weeks.

MRSA - often pronounced MER-sa - strikes adults and children, and it sometimes returns after treatment to cause havoc in a carrier's life. But its ability to kill quickly, even before it's diagnosed, is the most frightening part.

Mr. Chandler's survivors knew little or nothing about MRSA, beyond the sudden realization that Americans, who take such pride in their health care system, can be stricken and killed by an infection when they are otherwise healthy.

"He's a guy who climbed a hundred flights of stairs with an 80-pound weight on his back just to keep in shape," said his wife, Karen Chandler. "He was giving his life to help people, to help society."

Major health problem

When Mr. Chandler died so unexpectedly six months ago, MRSA had not yet reached the public spotlight, beyond the occasional death report.

It wasn't until last month that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention surprised the nation by announcing that 19,000 Americans were dying from MRSA infections every year, about 2,000 more than die of AIDS.

"Invasive MRSA disease is a major public health problem," concluded a government study in the Oct. 17 Journal of the American Medical Association, which estimated there were 95,000 severe MRSA infections in 2005.

Since May, Mrs. Chandler has channeled her grief into trying to understand how a simple infection could kill someone as strong as her husband, and, more importantly, why the doctors who treated him failed to diagnose it.

"When I was getting his medical records together, I decided that I needed to figure out what happened and why it was missed," Mrs. Chandler said.

"I knew nothing about staph or MRSA," said the 36-year-old sales representative, who switched to selling real estate to be closer to home after her husband died. The couple has a 6-year-old daughter, Faith.

Her mission to understand what killed her husband plunged her into a world of medical Web sites and scientific journals. She learned that MRSA bacteria live harmlessly in the nasal passages of roughly 30 percent of the U.S. population and that the bacteria can also infect the skin, causing a pimple or boil that clears up with or without treatment.

Severe MRSA cases were first detected among hospital patients in the 1960s and, two decades later, began spreading among drug abusers. Four children died of MRSA infection in Minnesota and North Dakota in 1997, signaling the growing threat posed by community-acquired strains.

Most people think they have a spider bite when the infection first appears. If the infection becomes invasive, it would be more difficult to stop because mainline antibiotics cannot kill MRSA.

Race with time

A timely test can determine the effectiveness of the other antibiotics, among them a powerful intravenous treatment for the most serious infections. But if the infection is spreading, it can become a race with time.

Mrs. Chandler spent the summer absorbing as much as she could about MRSA, sometimes asking a friend with a scientific background to interpret medical jargon.

The journey was heartbreaking at times.