FEARS that North-East hospitals are struggling to cope with increasing numbers of drug-resistant superbug victims are ill-founded, according to experts.

Reports suggesting that the region's hospitals had seen dramatic increases in reported cases of methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) - a bacterium that has developed a resistance to the more common antibiotics - are simply incorrect, said Dr Vivien Holyoak, director of the Health Protection Agency North-East.

Dr Holyoak spoke out to calm fears that patients entering hospitals in the region are at heightened risk of being infected.

"While over the past ten to 15 years we have seen an underlying increase in reported MRSA cases, there certainly has not been a sudden rise in actual infections," said Dr Holyoak.

Most people have the common bacterium staphylococcus aureus living on their skin.

Normally, it does not cause problems, but if it gets into an open wound or into the blood stream of a very ill hospital patient, it can be potentially serious.

Dr Holyoak said more cases of MRSA were being picked up in hospitals because of increased screening of new and transferred patients.

But the number of actual infections, which have to be reported to the Government, remains very small compared to the thousands of patients passing through hospitals every month.

"On average, the rate of serious MRSA infection in North-East hospitals are lower than in England as a whole, although there is a wide variation on a trust by trust basis," said Dr Holyoak.

This was because some larger trusts, such as the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust or South Tees Hospitals NHS Trust, tend to treat more seriously ill patients, she added.

In the first quarter of this year, all eight trusts in the North-East region reported a total of 120 confirmed MRSA infections, ranging from none at one trust to 28 at another.