MRSA really made headlines about six months ago. It seems to have fallen off the radar for reporters but not for doctors.

There have been outbreaks at schools, gyms, in some hospitals, and in care facilities. MRSA has reared surfaced again and again -- and it hasn't stopped. In fact, it's getting worse.

"The public needs to be aware of this,” said Dr. Will Sistrunk, an infectious disease specialist at St. John’s Hospital.

Sistrunk says he can't quantify how many cases he has seen lately -- just that that number is growing.

"There has been an increase in the United States of resistant staph infections and MRSA and so in Springfield we're not immune to that; we're seeing that also,” he said.

On skin, the infection sometimes starts as what people think are spider bites.

Doctors say MRSA is in part due to the result of decades of excessive and unnecessary antibiotic use. Germs that survived the treatments learned to resist others.

"If the staph becomes invasive, it can get into the blood stream and cause serious infection, including death,” said Sistrunk.

Cleanliness is the number one way to stop the spread of MRSA.

"They're most commonly spread by hand to hand contact and so that's why hand hygiene is so important,” said Sistrunk.

It seems like it would be so easy to prevent: wash your hands, don't share razors or towels, keep your wounds covered, shower after you work out, and use antibiotics properly.

The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta says the only numbers it tracks are for very severe cases -- and that is 94,000 across the nation. As for the Missouri Health Department, it tracks mostly cases of hospital acquired MRSA and 55 to 65 percent of those cases are resistant to most antibiotics. They expect that to eventually jump to 90 to 100 percent resistant.

It’s such a big problem that the CDC just launched a Web site for parents to let them know what to look for in their kids.

For information from the Centers for Disease Control, click here.