Streeter Lecka / Getty Images file

Cleveland's Brian Russell tackles Atlanta's Michael Vick during their game last week. The Browns safety was hospitalized before the season with a staph infection.

This summer, after five Redskins players were infected, the team had its practice facility sprayed with a sterilizing agent that controls the growth of bacteria and mold.

The club also installed new carpeting and painted the locker room, weight room, training room and other areas at Redskins Park in Ashburn, Va. In addition, benches in the locker room were replaced with individual wooden stools for each player, and a 15-year-old whirlpool bath was removed.

The team has had no incidents of staph since.

“The thing that I think is most important is educating the players what to look for, being smart about when you have an open skin lesion, don’t be getting in common whirlpools and things like that. You’ve got to really clean them good after you get them,” said Bubba Tyer, the Redskins’ trainer for 35 years.

“In the old days, when we played on Astroturf when it was new, remember all the burns and everything we’d get? We’d always put a bottle of surgical scrub soap in the shower and let them shower with that,” he said. “We’ve done things like that, and it’s working out well so far.”

MRSA is passed person-to-person through skin contact, and while its symptoms are normally mild, it can be fatal if left untreated.

In 2003, Ricky Lannetti, 21, a senior wide receiver at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa., died suddenly from a staph infection. Friends and teammates remembered him not feeling well leading up to his final game, but he didn’t think anything was seriously wrong.

For Russell, a tender elbow at first seemed like nothing out of the ordinary. He figured it came from one of many blows taken and given during training camp and in an Aug. 26 preseason game on the artificial turf in Buffalo.

But as he relaxed at home during an evening a few days after facing the Bills, Russell complained to his wife, Leslie, that he was hurting more than normal.

“She was like, ’C’mon, get outta here, you get those (scratches) every day,”’ he said.

“It didn’t look like anything to worry about,” she said.

But overnight, Russell’s sore elbow became horribly swollen and he and Leslie knew something was wrong.

“In a couple hours, it blew up, Russell said. “It was real, real big. By the time they got me to the hospital, my arm was overrun by the infection.”

While not an outbreak, the Browns’ alarming rise in staph cases brought the club to request assistance from the Cleveland Clinic, its healthcare provider and a sponsor. The Clinic twice sent a team to examine the team’s headquarters and indoor practice field house in Berea, Ohio.

The Clinic concluded the team was following proper procedure and CDC recommendations to prevent staph and that the five cases involving players were unrelated.

Russell’s bout with staph was similar to what happened to teammates Ben Taylor and Braylon Edwards, who both had elbow scratches that became infected. Browns tight end Kellen Winslow and center LeCharles Bentley battled staph following knee surgeries.

Russell credited team trainer Marty Lauzon and the team’s medical staff for making a quick diagnosis and getting him treatment.

“It was crazy,” he said, rubbing his hand over the long incision scar on his right elbow. “Lucky for me our doctors recognized it immediately.”

Russell, who has begun wearing long sleeves as protection and a precaution, will never look at a cut the same way.

“All I had was a sore elbow, something where you think you might have knocked it on a door or on a wall,” he said. “It was a little abrasion that I’ve had thousands of times.”

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