Mar 04 2007
Who’s at risk for antibiotic-resistant infections?
Developing a bacterial infection such as pneumonia is bad enough, but getting an antibiotic resistant strain can be fatal, especially for seniors. So, what’s the real risk of getting one of these tough-to-treat infections and how can we prevent them? Research funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) is helping find answers.
“When we think about preventing antibiotic-resistant infections there are a lot of assumptions about the importance of hand washing and prescribing appropriate doses of antibiotics,” says McMaster University’s Dr. Mark Loeb, an infectious diseases specialist. “But in many cases the data isn’t there to fully support these conclusions. Our aim is to determine who’s most susceptible and how we can minimize the risk of infection.”
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are those that can’t be killed with the drugs traditionally used to treat infected patients. The rates of these dangerous infections are climbing. In Canada, up to one-in-five cases of Streptococcus pneumonia, a pneumonia-causing bacterium, is antibiotic-resistant. About one-in-ten hospital cases of Staphylococcus aureus, simply called staph infection, is now multi-drug resistant.
“The concern is that in the future we won’t have antibiotics to treat these often deadly infections,” says Dr. Loeb.
He’s leading a large CIHR-funded study examining rates of antibiotic-resistant infection at 15 acute-care hospitals across Ontario. The researchers are comparing infection rates with a range of risk factors, from how frequently hospital workers wash their hands to staffing levels and patients’ age and income.
Previous studies have revealed that only about one-in-three hospital workers wash their hands before touching a patient. While many factors determine someone’s risk of infection, hand washing is considered the main line of defence in preventing the spread of these infections, says Dr. Loeb.
He’s also part of a ground-breaking, Ontario-wide study exploring community levels of antibiotic prescription and rates of antibiotic-resistant infections.
“No one has ever done this before at this scale and level of detail,” says Dr. Loeb, of the CIHR-funded research.
The study is using a unique provincial database that provides anonymous information about medication prescriptions. This information is presently being compared with the hundreds of cases of pneumonia and other antibiotic-resistant infections that occurred in the province during the study period.
Credit: www.newscanada.com
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