The bacterial infection that killed a Brooklyn middle school student, panicked many parents and sent school officials in many states into a frenzy of cleaning and disinfecting is only the latest manifestation of a very dangerous problem: the development of bacterial strains that are resistant to many antibiotics. It is a problem that needs to be tackled broadly, not just in a hasty reaction to the recent incidents.

The pathogen now generating fear — known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA — has long been infecting sick patients in hospitals and nursing homes. In the past decade it has developed into a major public health problem, sickening otherwise healthy individuals in the general community.

The vast majority of cases involve only a skin eruption, perhaps a reddish pimple or small boil that is easily treated. In some cases, the pathogen can invade the blood stream and internal organs, causing severe illness and even death. A recent government study concluded that the serious, invasive infections are a lot more widespread than previously thought: striking 94,360 people in this country in 2005 and contributing to the deaths of 18,650 of them, more than succumbed to AIDS that year.

The vast majority of serious infections — some 85 percent — were attributed to exposure in health care institutions, while only 15 percent stemmed from infection in the community, often at schools, gyms or other places where people come into close contact. The community form may be more virulent than the hospital-acquired form, but it is treatable with a wider range of antibiotics and caused only 8 percent of the deaths.

There is no vaccine to prevent the disease. To prevent spread of the pathogen where it is detected, health authorities recommend frequent hand-washing, cleaning and covering of cuts and scrapes; avoiding contact with other people’s wounds or bandages; and not sharing personal items like towels or razors. It makes sense to clean surfaces that come into contact with people’s skin, but most experts dismiss the idea that schools have to be scrubbed top to bottom, or even closed, if a case is found.

The discovery that MRSA is more prevalent than anyone thought reinforces the need for an aggressive, multipronged approach to curb the growing number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Health authorities need to tighten their surveillance systems or perhaps even require mandatory reporting of cases. Hospitals need to improve their infection control procedures and should probably screen high-risk patients or even all patients for dangerous germs, as many now do. In the case of MRSA, American farmers or government officials may also need to test pigs, which have been found to harbor the infection in other countries.

All hospitals should be required to report their rates of hospital-acquired infections. And the pharmaceutical industry, which invests relatively little in developing new antibiotics, needs to pick up the pace of discovery. Most important, the indiscriminate use of antibiotics in both medicine and agriculture needs to be limited so that resistant strains take longer to emerge.