The Rise of “Supergerms”
March 12, 2013
Infections caused by a particularly frightening form of drug-resistant germ are on the rise in U.S. hospitals. Health-care experts and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are warning in particular about the rise of a new form of bacteria, a drug-resistant enterobacteria. Enterobacteria are normal in the digestive system of humans, but they can cause infections and illness when they invade such other areas of the body as the blood stream or bladder. Infections caused by normal enterobacteria can be treated with antibiotics and cured. The new form of enterobacteria is resistant to all antibiotics, even drugs used by doctors as a last resort, such as carbapenems. Because of this resistance, the form is called carbapenem-resistant enterobacteria, or CRE’s.
Bacteria, such as this Clostridium, can cause serious infections in humans. (© David Phillips, Visuals Unlimited/Getty Images)
The fatality rate for people who contract this virtually untreatable type of infection in the bloodstream is around 50 percent. In addition, CRE’s have the ability to share their drug resistance–their genetic defenses against antibiotics–with other bacteria.
For now, CRE’s are found only in hospitals in the United States. Experts fear is that as it becomes more common in hospitals, it will eventually enter the community and begin infecting large populations.
It is possible for hospitals to reduce patients’ incidence of, and thereby infection with, drug-resistant bacteria. Some methods include 1) quickly identifying and isolating patients who test positive for such bacteria; 2) monitoring closely and lowering usage of antibiotics in hospital settings, as many drug-resistant germs thrive in settings where antibiotics are widely used; 3) more careful cleaning of patient rooms; and 4) vigilant hand washing on the part of all staff and visitors.
One aid in fighting this infection could be on the horizon. An American epidemiologist, Mark Stibich, has invented a robot that disinfects hospital rooms using pulses of ultraviolet (UV) light. The light used can disinfect both hard and soft surfaces. Thus far, only about 100 hospitals worldwide use the robot, but studies at such hospitals report a 75-percent drop in the rate of infection with another supergerm, Clostridium difficile (or C. diff). UV light works by disrupting the DNA of an organism, so it kills bacteria, even bacteria that have drug resistance.
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