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But a week after her surgery she developed a high fever and her doctor prescribed a broad spectrum antibiotic. A week later the fever continued to rise and her surgical wound turned red and hot. Her doctor tried a different class of antibiotic, then another, and another. Less than 3 weeks after her surgery the Newport News woman was back in the hospital, this time battling not cancer but a bacterial infection that didn’t respond to antibiotics.

“I could not believe this was happening to me,” Jaeger said. “I had home health care. I understood how important it was to be careful.”

Jaeger is one of an estimated 2 million Americans annually who contract methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus which is more commonly known as MRSA or a drug-resistant staphylococcus infection. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 90,000 people die from these secondary types of infections every year.

Today the number of cases is on the rise and is now expanding outside of health care facilities to other places where people play, work or live in locations where the bacteria may thrive such as athletic facilities, military bases and prisons.

Drug-resistant staphylococcus was first identified in the United Kingdom in 1961. After repeated exposure to an antibiotic, some bacteria can mutate enough to survive and multiply, producing offspring with built-in resistance to drugs such as methicillin, and a derivative of penicillin. As new drugs are introduced to combat the bacterium, it continues to mutate and develop additional resistances.

Scientists were able to stay one step ahead of the so-called super bugs for a while.

But last year, the Infectious Disease Society of America said pharmaceutical companies needed to develop more new drugs or cases of hard-to-treat infections would continue to increase. The group asked Congress to pass legislation giving drug makers financial incentives for antibiotic research, saying pharmaceutical companies were abandoning these drugs to focus on more lucrative medications.

Doctors say there are at least two strains of drug-resistant staphylococcus that developed independently and are actually vastly different super bugs with very different prognoses.

Although the strain found in health care settings can get into the bloodstream and be fatal, cases contracted elsewhere usually cause skin infections.

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine in August found that drug-resistant staphylococcus infections accounted for 59 percent of skin infections treated in U.S. emergency rooms.

“Five or 10 years ago, we didn’t see this,” said infectious disease specialist Dr. Stephen Green. “This was a very unusual thing. Now I’m seeing it once or twice a day.”

Green said that the bacteria typically live in a person’s nasal passages, but its main mode of transportation is through the hands.

People who contract the community version of the bacteria often say it starts with something that looks like a spider bite. Left untreated, the bacteria can cause skin infections that may look like a boil or pimple and may be red, swollen, and painful and need to be drained.