'Nightmare Bacteria' Becoming Resistant to Antibiotics

What has been referred to as "nightmare bacteria" is becoming increasingly resistant to the strongest antibiotics infected patients in 3.9 percent of all U.S. hospitals in the first half of 2012, including 17.8 percent of specialty hospitals, according to recent reports from public health officials.

"Our strongest antibiotics don't work and patients are left with potentially untreatable infections," Dr Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement. He said doctors, hospitals and public health officials must work together to "stop these infections from spreading."

At a news conference, he added, "it's not often that our scientists come to me and say we have to sound the alarm, but that's what we are doing today."

Researchers not that over the past decade, more and more hospitalized patients have been incurably infected with bugs, which can kill up to half of patients who get bloodstream infections from Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), according to a new CDC report. However, the report did not specify how many patients were killed by the bacteria, which normally lives in the water, soil and human digestive system.

Over the past decade, the proportion of Enterobacteriaceae that are resistant to the last-ditch antibiotics rose to 4.2 percent from 1.2 percent.

Almost all CRE infections occur in patients receiving medical care for serious conditions in hospitals, long-term acute-care facilities (such as those providing wound care or ventilation) or nursing homes.

The CDC is trying to make healthcare facilities more aware of the resistant germs, since their spread can be controlled with proper precautions and better practices. Israel, for instance, cut CRE infection rates in all 27 of its hospitals by more than 70 percent in one year.

Such measures include such standard infection control precautions as washing hands, as well as grouping patients with CRE together and dedicating staff, rooms and equipment to the care of patients with CRE alone, and using antibiotics sparingly. When an acute-care hospital in Florida had a yearlong CRE outbreak, implementing such measures cut the percentage of patients who got CRE to zero from 44 percent.