Table 1 Text reproduced from Casey JA et al. [6]

Case Ascertainment and Control Selection

Incident MRSA cases were identified primarily using laboratory cultures and secondarily by diagnosis codes (eg, International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision [ICD-9]) that indicated MRSA infection, as previously described.22 Cases were then classified as either CA-MRSA or HA-MRSA based on presence of health care risk factors (eg, hospitalization, surgery, dialysis, nursing home residence, indwelling device)22,31 or diagnosis more than 2 days after hospital admission using ICD-9 codes21,23,32 and Current Procedural Terminology codes. We then randomly selected patients with SSTI but no history of MRSA using 29 ICD-9 codes (eg, carbuncle, furuncle, abscess)22 and controls with no history of MRSA, and we frequency matched both groups with case patients by age (0-6, 7-18, 19-45, 46-62, 6274, ≥75 years), sex, and diagnosis or an outpatient encounter in the same year as MRSA diagnosis. The SSTI cases were evaluated as a separate case group because some SSTIs occurring during the study period were likely to have been caused by MRSA but not diagnosed as such, and high-density livestock production could cause SSTIs from other bacteria. Therefore, we selected patients with SSTIs without reference to any specific pathogen. If a control had multiple outpatient encounters during the year, a single encounter was randomly selected as the date for exposure assignment.