Recent staff illnesses not related to last year's staph infections

ST. LOUIS -- A St. Louis Rams' physician said the illnesses suffered recently by the team's former interim coach Joe Vitt, ex-coach Mike Martz and broadcaster Jack Snow are "all wildly different" than the drug-resistant staph infections a medical journal documented in Rams players last year.

"They are totally different," said Dr. Douglas Pogue, an internal medicine physician.

Moreover, the Rams haven't had a reoccurence of the methicillin-resistant infection outbreak that was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine last February, Pogue said.

He said the Rams organization bleached and sterilized every training table, sauna and surface, and educated players, coaches, and trainers in hygenic practices aimed at preventing a reoccurence.

"League-wide, it has not occurred," he said. "We had a national meeting about it."

Vitt, 51, who served as the Rams' interim coach for the last 11 games of the season, checked into a hospital Tuesday for treatment of a lingering hand infection.

But what was initially disclosed as staph infection was actually a "normal skin strep infection," a common skin ailment that wasn't healing, Pogue said.

Martz, 54, who was fired as coach on Monday, was treated this past fall for endocarditis, a bacterial infection of the heart valve. Pogue said the infection most likely was strep infection from the teeth or sinitis. "It was definitely not staph, or he would have been extraordinarily sick," he said.

Snow, 62, whom Pogue described as "fighting for his life right now," has a blood-borne staph infection. It originated as a sinus infection that entered the bloodstream and infected an artificial hip joint. His staph infection is not the kind that is resistant to first-line antibiotics, Pogue said.

In a widely publicized health episode reported last year, five Rams players who had suffered turf burns in 2003 developed a type of staph infection that is resistant to a common antibiotic known as methicillin.

The journal article said members of the San Francisco 49ers developed infections after playing the Rams early that season.

Medical experts believe skin-to-skin transmission among athletes in contact sports, along with inadequate hygiene, play a role in the growing incidence of the skin infection resistant to methicillin, an antibiotic commonly used to treat staph infections.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta found that Rams players and trainers did not have regular access to hand-cleaning material, that players shared towels and other personal items during practices and games.

Cases of this methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus -- commonly known as MRSA -- are exploding among athletes, prisoners and other close-contact communities here and around the world, said Eddie Hedrick, the emerging infections coordinator -- and an epidemiologist -- with the Missouri Department of Health. Until recently, it was most often acquired in hospitals because of exposure to and overuse of antibiotics.

The community-acquired strain has a particular toxin -- panton valentine leukocidin -- that makes infections much more severe.