Health officials are keeping their eye on what they call a “Superbug infection,” comprised of both the flu and MRSA virus.

According to ABC News, even on their own, infection with either influenza or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) can be grave. But now the challenge is watching out for the infection, made up of both diseases.

ABC says these cases of co-incident infection appear to be on the rise, in children at least.

According to an official health advisory from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued Jan. 30, between Oct. 1, 2006, and Sept. 30, 2007, the agency received a total of 73 reports of child deaths due to influenza. In 22 of these cases, the children were also infected with some form of the staph bug, mostly MRSA.

This compares with only three such cases of co-infection during the same period in 2005 and 2006, and just one such case identified in 2004-2005, ABC reported.

Concerns over such a surge was recently renewed when Massachusetts health officials linked MRSA to two recent deaths in children from the flu.

Dr. Jonathan C. Weissler, chief of medicine at University of Texas Southwestern University Hospitals in Dallas says this is not the first time viral and bacterial infections have gone hand in hand.

“It is well known that community-acquired staph pneumonia is much more common in patients who have influenza,” he says. “This has not changed.”

Infectious disease experts say spikes in this kind of co-incidence of influenza and drug-resistant bugs have happened in the past, with devastating results even for many healthy individuals, ABC reported.

Dr. William Schaffner, professor and chairman of preventive medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, says the key to heading off the dangerous Superbug is with increased vaccination rates, but notes that only about one-third of children actually receive the flu vaccine during a given season.

But this could change soon. Schaffner says that by the 2008-2009 flu season, the agency will change its guidelines to recommend that everyone under the age of 19 receive the flu vaccine, ABC says.