Posted on 07/09/2008 11:34:09 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Last Thursday the Office for National Statistics confirmed that more than 20 patients a day now die from the superbug infections, MRSA and C difficile.
NHS practice has been poor. MRSA (methicillin-resistant staphylococcal aureus) is a bacterium that many people carry, safely, in their noses. Yet when people are weakened by sickness, MRSA can invade the bloodstream and kill. In Scandinavia, Holland and Harley Street (three places where MRSA is rare) carriers are screened and treated before being admitted to the wards, but the NHS has been slow in following suit... when hospital toilets are poorly cleaned, when wards are overcrowded, or when people fail to wash their hands, patients will acquire C difficile from each other and, in their weakened state, die of diarrhoea...
Now that we can characterise the key enzymes of MRSA and C difficile, we might design new antibiotics systematically, not randomly. Science may indeed rescue us from the NHS's failings.
Yet the NHS, as a state monopoly, will find new ways to fail. And we will have ourselves to blame. The insurance-based systems of continental Europe - whose hospitals have bed occupancy rates of only 75 per cent and whose hospitals, being separately owned, compete for patients - are better than our own. But the British resist reforms that cost them money.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Well, when you give up things like handwashing and admit millions of people from third-world hellholes who cohabitate with goats, sheeps, camels and chickens, these things will happen.
They need to put me in charge.
If UK hospital are still using multi-patient “wards” in their hospitals rather than private rooms, as is pretty much standard in US hospitals, that may be why infections are so easily spread.
Each ward has a few private rooms but most are divided into bays of 8 patients.
I know that infection wise private rooms seem a good idea but I am not sure I would like it in hospital to be shut away on my own and probably only see someone when I needed an injection or tablet or food.
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