Hamilton, Montana lab unlocks one secret of Staph super-bug

A team of Hamilton scientists has unlocked a key secret behind the unusual potency of an aggressive and hard-to-treat kind of staph infection that is now killing more Americans than AIDS.

Michael Otto and his colleagues at the federal Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton have shown that the bug, known as methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, secretes a protein that pokes holes in one of the human body’s main disease-killing cells, destroying them.

What’s more, individual MRSA bacteria are able to sense their fellow super-bugs and only release their deadly protein when enough bacteria are present to deliver maximum damage to the body’s immune system cells.

By JENNIFER McKEE of the Missoulian State Bureau

Full Story: http://missoulian.com/articles/2007/11/12/news/local/news05.txt