Since sitcom writers have taken a break from comedy to join the Hollywood picket lines, I’m taking a break from my usual attempt to make you laugh (or cringe). Rather, I’d like to tackle some potential misinformation surrounding the scary-sounding “superbug” that has popped up in news headlines.

The hype surrounds a new report from a team of 17 researchers led by doctors at the University of California at San Francisco. Published this month in the “Annals of Internal Medicine,” the report concludes that gay men are “many times more likely” to acquire a new strain of drug-resistant, potentially lethal bacteria called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) USA300.

For 40 years, MRSA has been found primarily in hospital patients and hospital employees, and the number of cases – in gay and straight people – has grown in recent years due to increased resistance to antibacterial drugs, possibly in part due to increased resistance to antibacterial soaps (a subject still being debated).

The new “community-associated” MRSA USA300 is not only allegedly more easily picked up outside hospitals, it is also resistant to at least three common antibiotic alternatives to methicillin.

The UCSF-led study looks at patients diagnosed with MRSA infections from 2004 to 2006 at nine San Francisco hospitals and two outpatient clinics in San Francisco and Boston. In those patients, MRSA most frequently appeared as an abscess or inflammation (often as raised red dots) on the buttocks and between the anus and genitals.

Left untreated, infections can swell and fill with pus. In extreme cases, the bacteria can spread to organs and the lungs, causing pneumonia and becoming a deadly “flesh eating” disease.

The researchers note that while USA300 seems to be mostly spread through skin-to-skin contact, such as during anal sex, it could be spread potentially through more casual contact, since community-associated MRSAs have already been reported among daycare workers, military recruits, and sports teammates. Extrapolating from medical records, the researchers claim that USA300 has infected one in 588 people in San Francisco’s heavily gay Castro district, compared to one in 3,800 San Francisco residents as a whole. A few cases have also allegedly been reported in Los Angeles and New York.

The strain is resistant to methicillin, clindamycin, tetracycline, and mupirocin, but so far can be treated with trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (Bactrim), according to Dr. Henry F. Chambers, one of the report’s authors.

Echoing the vitriol of the early years of the AIDS epidemic, several anti-gay groups have already pounced on the new “superbug” report. Concerned Women for America (CWA), for example, last week published a press release pointing to the report as proof that so-called “sexual deviancy” of gay men is one of the leading causes in the recent rise in STDs.

Conveniently, CWA and other groups neglect to say that people have safely had same-sex relations for many centuries, and that STDs and AIDS are also risks associated with male-on-female sex.

Even the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which helped finance the USA300 study, affirmed in a statement last week that USA300 is not directly sexually transmitted or limited to gay men, adding that it has also been found in people who were not gay.

Long before this month’s report, UC researchers in 2005 published a study of 126 MRSA cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2003 at an HIV clinic in San Diego. That study concluded that up to 60 percent of the infections were acquired outside of a hospital, but those most at risk were a relatively small minority: HIV-positive people with high viral counts and low CD4 cell counts.

While both the 2005 and 2008 reports advocate caution, they concluded that more research on community-associated MRSA is needed.

So based on this information, should we all boycott gyms, sex and even hugs in favor of manhandling our Tivo remotes and Wii controllers? That would be quite a challenge – like asking gay men to give up martinis and Armani Exchange.

Unless you are a recently released hospital patient or HIV-positive person with high viral counts, you probably shouldn’t worry too much. But as preventative measures go, it’s smart to keep doing what we should always be doing: using a clean towel while using gym equipment, washing our hands often, and practicing safe sex – which, says Diep, should now include washing up right afterwards. Now pass that (non-antibacterial) soap.