Deaths and hospital stays from a drug-resistant intestinal superbug almost doubled in recent years, according to a report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The study found that the death rate from the dangerous germ rose to 2.3% in 2004, from 1.2% in 2000. Additionally, the number of Americans hospitalized with the disease grew to 291,000 in 2005 from 134,000 in 2000.
A bill that passed the state Senate this week would require California hospitals to step up prevention of drug-resistant infections, requiring that hospitals report new infections to the California Department of Public Health. The bill also requires that hospitals clean and disinfect a variety of sites, ranging from television consoles and telephones to cardiac monitors and feeding pumps, all of which are capable of carrying drug-resistant bacteria that can subsequently spread to other patients.
A Commonwealth Fund report examines how states perform on 13 different indicators in five categories: access to care, quality of care, cost, potential to lead healthy and productive lives, and equity in the quality of care provided regardless of race, income, or insurance status. It ranked states within each category and then assigned states a final overall ranking. Some say the findings show a need for a larger federal role in setting minimum standards to encourage better coverage and care for children.
All Ontario, Canada, hospitals will have to start reporting on the number of cases they have of the potentially deadly C. difficile bacteria starting Sept. 30. Critics claim Ontario was too slow to come up with a plan to deal with C. difficile after it claimed 2,000lives in Quebec in 2003, and insist some of the 260 deaths reported so far in seven Ontario hospitals could have been prevented. They also say the public has a right to know the extent of the C. difficile outbreak in all 157 hospitals in the province.
Common bacterial infections can cause some cases of sudden infant death syndrome, according to the British researchers. According to the American SIDS Institute, the rate of SIDS has dropped dramatically since 1983 because of concerted prevention efforts. Researchers conducted autopsies on 546 infants who had died suddenly between the ages of 7 and 365 days.
In this posting, Robert Wachter, MD, who writes the blog Wachter's World, questions why there's so much buzz out there about medical errors while diagnostic errors go on everyday with little notice. He says that someday we may reach a point when all pneumonia patients receive antibiotics and heart patients are given aspirin in a timely manner, but if the doctors giving those orders are wrong in their diagnosis, we really won't have made any advances in patient safety.