The AACC and Americal Society for Microbiology will jointly present an audioconference in March discussing strategies for managing the threat of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

MRSA is making news in communities nationwide, and is now the number one diagnosis in people presenting to United States emergency departments with skin and soft tissue infections. Serious MRSA infections occur in some 94,000 people annually, creating a need for solid surveillance programs that use test strategies designed to keep the threat at bay.

Managing the MRSA Threat: Test Strategies That Work, will be held March 12, 2008 from 2 pm to 3:30 pm Eastern time. The program is for lab administrators, directors, managers, and personnel who are interested in the processes and new test technologies being used to test patients for MRSA.

Some states are already mandating that hospitals offer MRSA surveillance programs.

Experts will discuss when and how to use new rapid molecular assays for MRSA, when to use culture versus molecular assays, how to determine which test strategies fit an institution’s needs, the perspective of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the MRSA threat, and how one community hospital lab set up a molecular testing program and lessons learned from the project.

Participants include Denise Uettwiller-Geiger, PhD, DLM (ASCP), director of clinical labs, John T. Mather Memorial Hospital, Port Jefferson, NY; Roberta B. Carey, PhD, chief, Clinical and Environmental Microbiology branch, division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, CDC, Atlanta, Ga;  Richard B. (Tom) Thomson, Jr, PhD, microbiologist and professor of pathology, Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine, Evanston Northwestern Healthcare, Evanston, Ill.

Cepheid, Sunnyvale, Calif, is helping to sponsor the program through an educational grant.