HOUSTON—What could Avery Brown, a 16-month old girl from the Houston area, possibly have in common with some of the biggest stars in the NFL?

The answer might surprise you: Staph infections.

Avery, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning have all contracted the dangerous infections.

So did basketball player Kenny George.  George’s was sobad, doctors were forced to amputate part of his foot.

Doctors and scientists are scared that they’re now battling a trend: Staph infections spreading from hospitals into our communities.

“I don’t think we’re losing the war, but we are having a lot of problems with it, so it’s a very fierce battle at the moment,” Dr. Cesar Arias, an infectious disease specialist at UT Houston, said.

Arias said what concerns him the most are staph infections that evolve into superbugs, like MRSA.

Staph lives naturally in most people’s noses and on their skin.

When it develops into MRSA, it’s called a superbug, because it’s resistant to some antibiotics.

That’s exactly what happened to Avery Brown.

“It was Saturday morning, she woke up and her face looked like nothing I had ever seen before,” her mother, Heather Brown, said.

Avery’s lip was covered with blisters.

“(They were) weeping and oozing. I didn’t know what it was,” Brown said.

It turned out to be MRSA, and it turned the Browns’ lives upside down.

Brown said the first round of antibiotics didn’t work, so she got a prescription for another antibiotic.

“I called pharmacies. I sat up until midnight calling 24-hour pharmacies, trying to find it. I found one that had one bottle, but I needed two,” she said.

Avery is fine now, but it took three agonizing weeks to knock the infection out.

So how do you know if you have MRSA?

It typically shows up in the form of a lesion, boil or abscess on the skin that doesn’t heal.

Then you develop a fever.

Dr. Arias said the over-use of antibiotics, ironically, is what is creating the super-bugs.

That’s because the staph bacterium often adapts to the drugs and grows stronger.

“So every time we give the antibiotic, they try to look for ways to destroy the antibiotic and survive. And the more antibiotics we give, the more possibilities they have to figure it out,” Arias said.

So while there are dozens of antibiotics on the market, many no longer work.

Dr. Arias said the bacteria are mutating so quickly, doctors and scientists are struggling to get new drugs to the market fast enough.

“We don’t have antibiotics. There is nothing that can be done, and we are getting to that point where we are running out of drugs,” he said.

Doctors and scientists believe the battle against MRSA is one they cannot afford to lose.