There's good and bad news on the "superbug" front. In community hospitals in the Southeast, an easily spread bacterium appears to have overtaken the widely feared MRSA as the most common hospital-acquired infection. But a pilot project in Ohio found that pushing hard on simple things such as hand washing and thorough cleaning can significantly lower rates.
Known as Clostridium difficile, or "C. diff," the bacterium is spread by contact and can cause intestinal infections and death. It mainly strikes those over 65.
More than 90% of cases happen after antibiotic use, when the healthy flora of the gut are destroyed and C. diff can flourish.
C. difficile was 25% more common than MRSA in a study of 28 hospitals in the Southeast, says Becky Miller, an infectious-disease researcher at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. The proportions nationwide aren't known.
MRSA "was the big bad pathogen in hospitals," but C. diff has overtaken it, Miller says. The data were presented over the weekend at a conference on hospital-acquired infections in Atlanta.
Rates of MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which causes serious skin infections, have been falling as hospitals increase infection control. Each year, an estimated 215,000 cases of hospital-acquired C. difficile occur in the USA, along with 263,000 in nursing homes. The hospital-acquired infections cost $1.6 billion a year to treat and result in 9,000 deaths, says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Ohio, a study of a quarter of state hospitals showed that following strict hygiene guidelines caused the number of cases to fall from 7.7 per 10,000 patient days in the hospital to 6.7, says Julie Mangino, a professor of internal medicine at Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus.
Other states are targeting C. diff prevention using federal stimulus money.
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