WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A drug-resistant type of “superbug” bacteria called MRSA is more than eight times as common as believed in U.S. hospitals, putting patients at risk and posing a big hygiene problem, experts said on Tuesday.

Beds are seen in a hospital in a file photo. A drug-resistant type of "superbug" bacteria called MRSA is more than eight times as common as believed in U.S. hospitals, putting patients at risk and posing a big hygiene problem, experts said on Tuesday. REUTERS/Lee Celano

They found that nearly 5 percent of patients -- 46 out of every 1,000 -- were infected or colonized with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA for short.

The one-day “snapshot” look at infection suggests that 1.2 million U.S. hospital patients may be infected each year, the survey by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology or APIC found.

Most of the infections have clearly originated in the hospitals and do not, contrary to popular belief, affect mostly intensive care patients, the experts said.

“This rate is between 8 and 11 times greater than previous MRSA estimates (which were more limited in scope and used different methodologies),” the group said in its report.

And 67 percent of the affected patients were being treated for general medical conditions such as diabetes and pulmonary and cardiac problems.

The survey of 1,200 health care facilities in all 50 states found close to 8,000 patients infected with MRSA, or colonized by the bug, meaning they had it somewhere in or on their bodies but did not have symptoms.

APIC recommends that hospitals and clinics take simple actions to prevent the spread of the bacteria, which has more than double the fatality rate of ordinary staph infections.

Number one priority is washing hands.

“Hand hygiene is the most important means of preventing the spread of infection,” said APIC president Denise Murphy, who is also a safety officer at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis.

But many studies have shown it is difficult to persuade health care workers to do this consistently.

Jarvis said it would be too difficult to test each and every health care worker, but it is simpler to identify which patients are the likeliest to be carriers of MRSA and institute tight procedures around them.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that in 1974, only 2 percent of staph infections in hospitals and other health care settings were MRSA; by 2004, nearly 63 percent were.

The activist group Consumers Union said hospitals must do more. “It’s time for hospitals to aggressively step up their efforts to protect patients from these preventable infections,” said Lisa McGiffert, director of Consumers Union’s Stop Hospital Infections Campaign.