MRSA infection rates in britain's hospitals are the highest in Europe according to a new report.

The latest dispatch of the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance describes the recorded levels of the superbug as "alarmingly high".

An antibiotic resistant bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphyloccus aureaus, is the most common cause of death from a hospital-acquired infection. Only the antibiotic vancomycin is powerful enough to combat the bug - to which the old are particularly vulnerable.

Forty-one per cent of strains of Staphyloccus aureaus in UK hospitals were found to be antibiotic resistant compared with one per cent in Sweden and Finland and zero in the Netherlands. Israel and Greece were only slightly better than the UK with recorded levels of 44.1 per cent and 38.6 per cent respectively.

Dr Barry Cookson of the Public health Laboratory Service said that hospital overcrowding - combined with inadequate isolation facilities - was responsible for the spread of the bug. "We have a system that could almost be designed to spread MRSA - it is a cauldron," he said.

Funded by the European Commission, EARSS is an international network of national surveillance systems, which aims to "collect comparable and reliable antimicrobial resistance data for public health action".