Project CLEAR

MRSA Absence-Presence Dataset

MRSA isolates were collected as part of the CLEAR (Changing Lives by Eradicating Antibiotic Resistance) Trial. The trial was designed to compare the impact of a repeated decolonization protocol plus education on general hygiene and environmental cleaning to education alone on MRSA infection and hospitalization. Study subjects in the trial were recruited from hospitalized patients based on an MRSA positive culture or surveillance swabs. After recruitment, swabs were obtained from different body parts of subjects (nares, skin, throat, and wound) around the time of hospital discharge (ENRL) and at 1,3,6 and 9 months (V1-V4, respectively) following the initial visit, after which the swabs were cultured on chromogenic agar. The application of decolonization protocol lasted only for 6 months, and consequently, we only modeled visits until V3 in this study. We note that some enrolled study subjects, despite a positive culture (clinical or surveillance) during the hospital stay, did not have discharge swabs positive for MRSA at the first time point (ENRL). The data used in this study are collected from people aged over 18 (average age=56, SD=17) for both the education and decolonization groups, with eligibility requirements also including hospitalization within previous 30 days and positive testing for MRSA during the enrollment hospitalization or within the 30 days before or afterwards. Exclusion criteria included hospice care and allergy to the decolonization products. Over the course of the trial, 98 of 1063 participants (9.2%) in the education group and in 67 of 1058 (6.3%) in the decolonization group developed MRSA infections, and 84.8% of the MRSA infections resulted in hospitalization. More details about recruitment and eligibility, follow up, sample collection, and data preprocessing can be found in the reference https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa1716771.