NHANES is an abbreviation that’s quite familiar to
epidemiologists of all stripes: the National Health and
Nutrition Examination Survey. This survey dates back to 1956
with the passage of the National Health Survey Act, providing
legislative authorization for “a continuing survey to provide
current statistical data on the amount, distribution, and
effects of illness and disability in the United States.”
Generally, information from these surveys has been used to look
at the effect of nutrition, particularly micronutrients, on the
health status of the population, or subgroups within the
population. However, survey data and biological samples obtained
from those enrolled in these studies can be used for other
purposes as well—and one recent study took advantage of this. A
new publication by Kuehnert et al. uses NHANES samples to
examine colonization with Staphylococcus aureus. As with many
pathogens, a significantly greater number of us are asymptomatic
carriers of this bacterium than are sickened by the pathoge