Deadly infections with bacteria that resist even the strongest antibiotics are on the rise in U.S. hospitals, and there is only a “limited window of opportunity” to halt their spread, health officials warned yesterday.
The bacteria, normally found in the gut, have acquired a lethal trait: They are unscathed by antibiotics, including carbapenems, a group of drugs that generally are considered a last resort.
When these resistant germs invade parts of the body where they do not belong, like the bloodstream, lungs or urinary tract, the illness may be untreatable. The death rate from bloodstream infections can reach 50 percent.
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called the organisms “nightmare bacteria” during a telephone news conference and noted that they could pass their genetic trait for drug resistance along to other bacteria.
Most people who contract these infections already have other serious illnesses that require complicated treatment and lengthy stays in hospitals, nursing homes or long-term-care facilities.
Frieden said the infections do not seem to have spread beyond hospitals into the community at large, but that could easily happen.
Forty-two states have had cases of carbapenem-resistant infection. The problem is most common in the Northeast, particularly in hospitals in New York City, officials said. In one of the worst outbreaks, 18 patients at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., contracted a CRE strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae in 2011. Seven patients, including a 16-year-old boy, died.
The outbreak began when a patient unknowingly infected with CRE was transferred from a New York City hospital.
Nationwide, about 4 percent of short-stay hospitals reported such infections in the first half of 2012, but the rate was much higher — 18 percent — among long-term acute-care hospitals, which treat people who need ventilators for a long time or who have chronic problems.
The disease centers recommended a variety of ways to try to stop the infections, including the usual call for ruthless scrubbing of all surfaces and relentless hand-washing.
But hospitals also are urged to find out whether patients are infected, isolate those who are, and assign dedicated-care teams and equipment to infected people to avoid spreading the bacteria to others.
Catheters and intravenous lines should be removed as quickly as possible, because they can be avenues of infection, and doctors should prescribe antibiotics only when they are truly needed.
Information from Reuters was included in this story.