Increased Rate of Carriage of Staphylococcus aureus among Narcotic Addicts

Because of the high frequency of serious sepsis with Staphylococcus aureus among users of parenteral drugs and because our earlier studies failed to implicate narcotic mixtures or injection paraphernalia, we determined the rate of carriage of S. aureus in a population of users of parenteral drugs and in normal controls. Approximately 11% of 55 control subjects harbored the organism. The length of the interval since drug injection influenced the rate of carriage in the drug-using population. Ten percent of drug users who had not had drug injected for two weeks or more before culture carried S. aureus, in contrast to 35% of those who had had injections within one week of culture. The latter increased carriage rate was significantly different from that of the other two groups.