No students, staff nor faculty members in Baltimore region schools have died from complications related to staph infection since the beginning of the school year, school and health officials said Tuesday.

The first reported death from methicillin-resistant Staphyloccoccus aureus, the antibiotic-resistant strain of staphylococcus, was Merry King, 48, a teacher at Herbert Hoover Middle School in Montgomery.

Her daughter, Charlotte Oliver, said King, who died Sunday evening, first went to the hospital 10 days ago complaining of persistent pain. She was given pain pills and sent home.

“The hospital missed the diagnosis initially,” said Oliver, 27.

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“She called me again and said she was hurting all over, and on Tuesday [Dec. 3] she was admitted.”

It was not clear when or how King contracted the illness, her daughter said. “I wish [health officials] could pinpoint it, but unfortunately they really don’t know.”

Public school administrators sent a letter home with students Monday linking the death to complications from MRSA.

“As a school family, we will pull together to help our students and each other cope with this terrible loss,” Hoover Principal Billie-Jean Bensen wrote in the letter.

Grief counselors will be available to help students, she wrote.

Oliver also worried about the impact on her mother’s special education students.

“She had a very special connection with her children,” she said.

“For an autistic child to understand this death, that is going to be difficult.”

King’s death is the first reported in the county among either public school educators or students. It comes two months after MRSA began a rapid yet seemingly random spread in the county, infecting at least 39 students or staff at 31 schools.

In Montgomery, one active case each was reported at Northwest High and Germantown Elementary schools, and two active cases were reported at Arcola Elementary School, said school spokeswoman Kate Harrison.

“The school is taking this very, very seriously,” Hoover Parents and Teachers Association President Geri Shapiro said. “Her classroom is being sanitized.”

News of King’s death raised fears among some parents.

“It’s so unusual that it’s frightening, but the odds of it happening are so small,” Diana Conway, who has two children at Hoover, said Monday.

Oliver, an only child, remembered her mother as someone who spent her life in service to others, as an Army veteran and later as a teacher. “She was very good at teaching. It was what she lived to do,” Oliver said.

An estimated 90,000 people in the United States fall ill each year from MRSA, which can be spread through skin-to-skin contact or through contact with contaminated objects.

It is not clear how many die from the infection; one estimate put it at more than 18,000, which would be slightly higher than U.S. deaths from AIDS.

BY THE NUMBERS

Confirmed cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus this year in Baltimore region public schools:

» Anne Arundel: 12

» Baltimore City: 4

» Baltimore County: 2

» Carroll: 6

» Harford: 1 (student, but at a non-school setting)

» Howard: 11 as of Nov. 13 when officials stopped reporting incidents

Source: School and health officials

Staff Writer Josh Kowalkowski and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

cmabeus@dcexaminer.com