Newspaper reporting of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and 'the dirty hospital'

A distinctive tone is apparent in UK press coverage of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), dominated by the metaphor of 'the dirty hospital', which emphasises defects in hospital cleanliness and failures of government and National Health Service management. We found no primary evidence for a linkage between hospital cleanliness and MRSA incidence in publicly available data. We therefore sought the sources of this type of reporting. A textual analysis of all articles (2000-2007) about MRSA in the UK national press was performed to detect a bias towards reporting MRSA in terms of hospital cleanliness over other accepted risk factors for MRSA. This was supplemented by interviews with eight journalists and a detailed chronology of newspaper and other media releases in February 2000, seeking reasons why hospital cleanliness and MRSA have been linked. There is a strong bias in newspaper coverage of MRSA to link this infection with hospital cleanliness. The events around reporting of a National Audit Office publication in February 2000 appear to be particularly important in defining the cause of MRSA as dirty hospitals. The metaphor of 'the dirty hospital' was derived from, and was a distortion of, official reports from government departments. It had a certain evocative power, with public acceptance, and so became used by journalists, on the one side, and by politicians, government officials and ministers on the other, in a cycle of mutual reinforcement.