‘Nightmare bacteria’ alarms CDC director
WASHINGTON – Government officials want the nation’s health care providers to step up efforts to halt the spread of a drug-resistant “nightmare bacteria” that attacks the bloodstream and kills up to half of patients who become infected.
In the first half of 2012, nearly 200 hospitals and acute care facilities treated at least one patient for the lethal “superbug” known as CRE, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC, called CRE a “nightmare bacteria” because of its high mortality rate, its resistance to nearly all antibiotics, and its ability to spread its drug resistance to other bacteria that otherwise would be vulnerable to vaccines.
“It’s not often that our scientists come to me to say that we have a very serious problem and we need to sound an alarm. But that’s exactly what we’re doing today,” Frieden said Tuesday in a telephone press briefing.
Patients receiving long-term or complex medical care in hospitals and nursing homes are at the greatest risk for CRE infection. The bug is spread mainly by unclean hands, but medical devices like ventilators and catheters increase the risk of infection because they allow the bacteria to get deep into a patient’s body, Frieden said.
CRE stands for carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, part of a family of more than 70 bacteria that live in the digestive system. A strain of the superbug killed seven patients in 2011 at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., but the deaths were not disclosed until 2012.
In their wake, the CDC issued recommendations for health care facilities to stop the spread of the bacteria, and many saw dramatic declines in CRE infections as a result, Frieden said.
But many facilities haven’t adopted the recommendations, and the bacteria continue to spread. If the health care community doesn’t do a better job of containing it, experts say, it could advance beyond hospitals and nursing homes, where it has been concentrated. The fear is it could follow the pattern of another bacterial superbug, known as MRSA, which has turned up in schools, gyms and other public facilities.
“Compliance with hand-washing, with using gowns and gloves properly, remains a challenge, and it’s something that we call on health care facilities to work with their providers” to do a better job of, said Arjun Srinivasan, the CDC’s associate director for hospital-associated infection prevention programs. “We have the weapons at our disposal right now to stop this from becoming a bigger problem.”
Nancy Foster, vice president of quality and patient safety policy at the American Hospital Association, said hospital testing should be a facility’s decision, based on the prevalence and risk of CRE in the area. The added cost of testing and the protocol that comes with it is often an expense that many hospitals would struggle to fund, but Foster said the AHA supports hospitals looking for creative ways to finance those efforts.