Controlling Hospital Acquired Infections at UVA
In March of 1978 a patient was admitted to the University of Virginia (UVA) Medical Center who was infected with MRSA, a type of antibiotic-resistant staph. The hospital
found that this then-new “superbug” was a formidable and persistent foe - they couldn’t get rid of it, and it spread quickly...
The Story of Michael and Mark Bennett
Mark Bennett's tragic death due to multiple hospital-acquired infections led his son, Michael, to become an unrelenting advocate for improved infection control.
The Problem
Antibiotic Resistance: A Growing Threat
Our ability to treat common bacterial infections with antibiotics goes back only 65 years. Yet increasing resistance to these wonder drugs has already returned us to an era when many strains of bacteria cannot be easily treated. If left unaddressed, antibiotic resistance has the potential to derail the health care system and recreate a world where children and the elderly - and even hometown sports heroes and our fighting armed forces - routinely die from simple bacterial infections.
The world could be faced with previously treatable diseases that have again become untreatable, as in the days before antibiotics were developed.
Interagency Task Force on Antimicrobial Resistance
The Toll on Human Health
Every day in the United States, approximately 172 men, women, and children—63,000 or more every year—die from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria in hospitals alone. The number, which exceeds the U.S. mortality from AIDS, may actually be higher because many deaths attributed to other causes, particularly those of elderly patients suffering from myriad problems, may in reality be due to antibiotic resistant infections.
As an indication of the scale of the problem, high-level penicillin resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae in the United States has experienced a thousand-fold increase in the last 20 years - from 0.02 percent in 1987 to over 20 percent in 2004 (CDC 2005). From 1974 to 2004, the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has climbed from roughly 2 percent to more than 50 percent in many U.S. hospitals.
Mounting Impacts
Drug-resistant infections affect patients, health care systems, and society by increasing the cost of treating infections and causing greater disability and death. Billions of dollars' worth of avoidable costs accrue to our health care system because resistant infections require longer hospital stays and more expensive drugs. Infections from just six common resistant bacteria cost our health system nearly $2 billion a year – more than the total annual spending on influenza.
The impact of antibiotic resistance is not restricted to infectious diseases. Many modern medicinal procedures, from organ transplants and chemotherapy to basic surgery, require effective drugs that can ward off infection.
