Fighting super bug, Boardman boy wins battle

BOARDMAN — Andy Zack was a typical, healthy and active boy who played organized soccer and basketball and enjoyed riding his mountain bike.

But last August, a metatarsal bone in his foot was broken in a crash on his bike. About a week later, he suffered a bruised hip when he hit the brakes on his bike and slid forward into the bike’s top tube.

Less than a week later, the 11-year-old was literally fighting for his life against a virulent staph infection that was eating holes in his lungs.

A so-called super bug, CA-MRSA, community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureas, had invaded Andy’s body just weeks after he had moved to Boardman from Fort Collins, Colo.

It would be nearly nine months — March of this year — before Andy was clear of the infection and out from under a doctor’s care.

“I thought I was going to lose Andrew to this infection,” said his father, John Zack, a Boardman native.

Andy, now 12 and in the seventh grade at Boardman Glenwood Middle School, is featured in the August 2007 edition of Reader’s Digest in an article titled “Deadly Super Bugs,” along with two other young people afflicted with CA-MRSA. One, a 16-year-old football player from Georgia, survived to became his old self. The other, a 2-month girl, did not live.

Read the complete story Monday in The VIndicator and on Vindy.com.