Mary Harney (Dublin Mid West, Progressive Democrats)

It is not only the Minister for Health and Children who is not able to tell the Deputy, nobody else can tell her either because we do not have that data recorded. People acquire MRSA in many settings and not exclusively in a hospital environment. As I said, the HSE will work on a hospital by hospital reporting mechanism. If it is possible to separate the data and establish if somebody died from MRSA as opposed to something else, clearly it would be desirable to have that data. At present we report incidence of MRSA in hospital settings and they are the figures I have.

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