MOUNT VERNON — Last week, a suspected case of staphylococcus infection was reported at Mount Vernon High School. Since it involved a football player, school officials had team members clear their lockers and take everything home to be washed.

“The coach had the kids take all their equipment home and wash all their things,” said Superintendent Steve Short. “Our trainer does routinely spray and sterilize equipment after students use it, and after the players are done in different areas and different places. There is spray there for them to use when they do lifts and those sorts of things. He was extra careful in this situation.”

“When we heard ‘staph’ we jumped on it,” said Janet Stutzman, district school nurse. “We started taking precautions, just in case, to look out after the health and well-being of the students. We do try to do a thorough cleaning all the time, but as soon as we hear of something like this we are even more meticulous.”

Stutzman said the situation is not unusual as far as athletes are concerned.

“Because staph is not highly contagious, as a cold is highly contagious,” she said, “you have to have a few things in place to get a staph infection. Usually a skin laceration is already there, and then you have to be unlucky enough to get in contact with it. Especially with a sports situation, players have frequent skin to skin contact, and that would make them slightly more susceptible to staph infections than the rest of the students in general.”

Professional athletes also have to deal with similar situations. Last April, for example, Cleveland Browns’ Joe Jurevicius was out for the season with a staph infection. He is on injured reserve right now, according to Short, and is the sixth Browns player in the past four years to come down with the disease.

In cases such as at the high school, Stutzman said all the items such as clothing and towels need to be carefully laundered and the equipment wiped off with a disinfectant cleaner.

“As far as clothes and towels go, a normal washing and drying in a hot dryer will wash the staph germs away,” she said.

In addition to not sharing items such as towels in the locker room, the most important preventative measure is good hand washing, Stutzman said, in the home as well as at school.

“You think about hand washing with colds and flu and all of that,” she said, “but certainly the most common way that staph infections are passed around, too, is the hands. You really do contact stuff with your hands far more frequently than you think.

“We need to prevent staph infections as much as we can in all schools and public places,” Stutzman continued. “It’s just kind of everywhere.”

The student will not rejoin the team until he has clearance from a doctor. He needs to be well, first, said Stutzman.