Hospitals now must report serious staph cases to officials

California for the first time is requiring that hospitals report to local health authorities certain kinds of staph infections that result in death or a stay in the intensive-care unit. Until now, there has been no state requirement for reporting staph infections. As a result, disease trackers have had a hard time calculating the severity of the problem. The new reporting requirement, however, is limited to cases that start outside hospitals or nursing homes in otherwise healthy people--leaving out about 85 percent of life-threatening encounters with the most feared bug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.