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Drug-resistant superbugs are sickening American hospital patients at an alarming rate — but the reality of these “nightmare bacteria” infections is even worse than the headlines suggest.
Last week, researchers at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced a “shocking” increase in drug-resistant CRE infections — which tripled from 2019 to 2023 and caused an estimated 1,100 deaths.
But the ugly truth is dirty hospitals are killing patients, regardless of whether it’s CRE or some other germ.
CRE is short for Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales, a class of bacteria new to the US since 2001 that can only be treated with IV antibiotics, not oral medications.
Half the time not even IV medications work, and the patient dies.
According to the CDC report, CRE spreads in hospitals because health-care workers skip cleaning their hands in between patients, while hospitals fail to scrub rooms and sanitize medical equipment — even devices inserted in patients to diagnose them. Ugh!
That’s the same way that common bacterial infections spread from patient to patient in hospitals, causing 100,000 deaths a year.
CRE is merely a red flag. The problem is far bigger than one germ.
And as other common bacteria evolve to become more drug-resistant, going into a hospital will be an increasingly dangerous prospect — unless our health-care system cleans itself up.
Literally: Cleanliness is the first line of defense to protect patients from killer germs.
But many hospitals refuse to make it a priority.
Shockingly, the No. 1 predictor of which patients get a hospital infection is what room or bed they’re assigned to.
Not their age, not the illness that sent them to the hospital — their room number.
If a patient is placed in a room where the preceding patient had an infection, the risk of getting infected goes up almost fivefold, according a major study of New York City hospitals published in the American Journal of Infection Control.
In other words, the previous patient was discharged, but the germs were left behind on the bedrail, call button, curtain and mattress — all invisibly lurking to sicken the next patient.
Clostridium difficile, C. diff for short, is the most prevalent hospital-spread infection, killing nearly 30,000 Americans a year.
It’s caused by oral-fecal contamination. Traces of one patient’s feces get into another patient’s mouth.
How could such a gross thing happen in a hospital?
Easy — placing the patient in a bed with a dirty mattress. Beds are cauldrons of infection-causing germs.
Emory University scientists tracked the fate of patients placed in a bed where a preceding patient — even 90 days before — had C. diff: The risk of infection more than doubles.
Mattresses absorb bodily fluids and are usually only inspected once a year.
Here’s the bottom line: The CDC has been sounding the alarm about drug-resistant infections for years now.
Former CDC Director Tom Frieden coined the phrase “nightmare bacteria” about CRE back in 2013.
Well, the nightmare is still spreading — and one of its chief causes can be remedied if only the agency musters the will to do it.
The CDC should be setting rigorous, detailed hospital cleaning standards, and ditch the vaguely worded, clearly ineffective blather it calls “guidelines.”
Are you listening, Secretary Kennedy?
Until 1970, hospitals routinely tested surfaces for bacterial contamination.
Then the American Hospital Association and the CDC jointly advised them to stop that routine testing, reasoning that any patient infections could be treated with antibiotics, which had come into wide use.
Those treatments are no longer enough: The drugs don’t work against many of the superbugs, including CRE.
Lax hospital hygiene is dooming patients to sickness and death — whether they’re infected by a new, rare organism or a by a common one like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staph) or C. diff.
As drug resistance increases, the danger will soar unless hospitals change their ways.
New Yorkers should be especially outraged.
New York state is a national health-care capital, yet hospital infection rates are higher here than the national average, according to the state Department of Health.
Not good for patients and lousy for business.
If you’re visiting a loved one in the hospital, skip the flowers, cards and candy.
Instead, bring a canister of bleach wipes and scrub down the bedrail, call button and other surfaces everyone touches.
Sounds ridiculously basic, but it works: A study at the Mayo Clinic showed that cleaning high-touch surfaces around the bed once a day with a bleach wipe reduced C. diff infections by 86%.
That simple step could save a life.
Question is, why isn’t every hospital doing it?
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and co-founder of SAVENYC.org.
