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Fido and Fluffy may be reservoirs of the deadly bacteria -- or maybe we sicken them.

According to a story by MSNBC.com's health writer JoNel Aleccia, we may be getting sick from our pets.  Or, perhaps, we are sick, and we give sickness to them.  A recent study from the New England Journal of medicine reinforces the link between staph, and MRSA in particular, and our house pets and other domesticated animals. Here's an excerpt:

“We’ve found MRSA in dogs, cats, rabbits, pigs — even marine mammals,” said J. Scott Weese, an associate professor of pathobiology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Horses and cows also are routinely affected.

So far, it’s clear that humans and pets can be colonized with the MRSA bacteria, said John R. Middleton, an associate professor of food animal medicine and surgery at the University of Missouri.  That doesn’t mean they’ve got active infections, just that they’re carriers of the germs that are resistant to most frontline antibiotics.

An ongoing study of some 600 people-pet households across the U.S. showed that staph aureus germs were present in nearly 28 percent of people and about 13 percent of pets. About 10 percent of households had both a human and an animal colonized.

MRSA, the drug-resistant strain, was detected in more than 5 percent of humans and about 3 percent of dogs and cats, Middleton said.

What’s not so clear is whether people got MRSA from their pets — or whether they gave it to them, researchers said. One theory is that pets may pick up the bacteria from people, but then serve as reservoirs, harboring the bugs so they can reinfect humans.

“Pets could be innocent bystanders, or they could be significant sources of infection,” Weese said. “They’re probably somewhere in between.”