PVL, or Panton-Valentine Leukocidin

Health scares are always more effective when you can distil them down to a few initials. HIV, vCJD, SARS, H5N1 and MRSA are good examples.

The letters have a sinister ring that somehow adds to the threat. They make the danger sound alien and impersonal, a technicality of nature that kills without discrimination, simply because that it what it does.

Now there’s a new addition to the list - PVL, or Panton-Valentine Leukocidin, the toxin produced by an extra-deadly strain of MRSA that can attack healthy young people and kill in 24 hours.


At least 11 cases of PVL have been confirmed, including both patients and staff at the University Hospital of North Staffordshire NHS Trust in Stoke-on-Trent.

At the time the outbreak was confirmed, two victims, a hospital worker and a patient, were known to have died. Six further affected people were found after all staff who had direct contact with the pair were screened. Three more cases were later identified, one of whom was a former patient at the hospital.


While hospital-acquired MRSA, a drug-resistant form of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria, is usually only fatal to elderly or infirm patients, PVL can strike down healthy young people.


Like the Aids virus HIV, the toxin kills the white blood cells of the immune system, leaving sufferers unable to fight infection. However, despite the lurid headlines, the threat is not new. In fact, it was thought that PVL had been virtually eradicated in the 1950s.

The strain is passed between people in close contact, in situations where skin irritation is likely, such as during sporting activity. Last year doctors were issued with urgent advice about PVL after it emerged that a super-fit young Royal Marines recruit may have died after catching the bug in Devon.

Richard Campbell-Smith, 18, was four weeks from the end of his 32-week course at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone. He reportedly scratched his legs while running on October 31, 2004.

He died at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital on November 2. A post-mortem showed heart and respiratory failure, and traces of PVL were later found.

PVL is produced by 1.6% of staphylococcus bacteria, which are termed MRSA when they are resistant to the antibiotic methicillin. The toxin usually causes skin infections such as abscesses or boils. If caught early it can normally be treated with antibiotics, but once in the lungs it has a 40% mortality rate.

Although MRSA is usually associated with hospitals, rarer cases of the strain caught in the community have been recorded. It’s from these community-associated cases that the PVL scare has emerged.

An HPA spokesperson issued this comforting statement: "It is important to note that once identified, this form of MRSA responds more readily to antibiotics than other more common forms of MRSA."