Infections With ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Are On The Rise In U.S. Hospitals
March 19th, 2013Almost as an afterthought, this sentence closes out the piece:
And doctors have to use antibiotics more carefully to prevent more germs from developing into dangerous superbugs.
So, in other news, The Insane Overuse of Antibiotics in Industrial Meat Production and FDA Won’t Regulate Use of Antibiotics in Healthy Livestock Intended for Human Consumption.
And now…
Via: NPR:
Federal officials warned Tuesday that an especially dangerous group of superbugs has become a significant health problem in hospitals throughout the United States.
These germs, known as carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, have become much more common in the last decade, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And the risk they pose to health is becoming evident.
“What’s called CRE are nightmare bacteria,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, tells Shots. “They’re basically a triple threat.”
First of all, they are resistant to virtually all antibiotics, including the ones doctors use as a last-ditch option.
Second, these bugs can transfer their invincibility to other bacteria. “The mechanism of resistance to antibiotics not only works for one bacteria, but can be spread to others,” Frieden says.
Third, the bacteria can be deadly. Infection with the bacteria “have a fatality rate as high as 50 percent,” Frieden says.
…
Infectious disease specialist Dr. Brad Spellberg, of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, likens the situation to the Titanic’s ill-fated voyage. “We’re not talking about an iceberg that’s down the line,” he says. “The ship has hit the iceberg. We’re taking on water. We already have people dying. Not only of CRE, but of untreatable CRE.”
So far, these infections are still relatively rare. And they have been seen only in hospitals.
The big fear is that they’ll start to move out of hospitals and into the communities around them. “If CRE spreads out of hospitals and into communities, that’s when the ship is totally underwater and we all drown,” Spellberg says.
