When it comes to curing skin infected with the antibiotic-resistant bacterium MRSA, timely and proper wound cleaning and draining may be more important than the choice of antibiotic, according to a new Johns Hopkins Children’s Center study. The work was published recently in the medical journal Pediatrics. Researchers originally set out to compare the efficacy of two antibiotics commonly used to treat staph skin infections, randomly giving 191 children either cephalexin, a classic anti-staph antibiotic known to work against the most common strains of the bacterium (but not MRSA), or clindamycin, known to work better against the resistant strains. Much to the researchers’ surprise, drug choice didn’t matter: 95 percent of the children in the study recovered completely within a week, regardless of which antibiotic they got. The finding led the research team to conclude that proper wound care, not antibiotics, may have been the key to healing. “The good news is that no matter which antibiotic we gave, nearly all skin infections cleared up fully within a week,” says study lead investigator Aaron Chen, M.D., an emergency physician at Hopkins Children’s. “The better news might be that good, low-tech wound care — cleaning, draining, and keeping the infected area clean — is what truly makes the difference between rapid healing and persistent infection.” Although the Johns Hopkins investigators stop short of advocating against prescribing antibiotics for uncomplicated MRSA skin infections, they call for studies that directly measure the benefit — if any — of drug therapy versus proper wound care. “Many physicians understandably assume that antibiotics are always necessary for bacterial infections, but there is evidence to suggest this may not be the case,” says senior investigator George Siberry, M.D., M.P.H., a Hopkins Children’s pediatrician. “We need studies that precisely measure the benefit of antibiotics to help us determine which cases warrant them and which ones would fare well without them.”