Invisible Dangers:
ARE CANADIAN HOSPITALS DOING ENOUGH TO FIGHT INFECTIONS?

Patients admitted to Canadian hospitals expect that their stay will make them healthier, yet a record number of Canadians are taking an infection home with them. And often those infections are resistant to many antibiotics, requiring people to take powerful medicine to fight the infection.

Methicillin-resistant staphlycoccus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and Clostridium difficle are the most common
hospital-acquired infections.

An estimated 8,000 people die from antibiotic-resistant infections each year.

Studies show that patients will spend on average an additional 39 days in hospital recovering from an antibiotic-resistant infection.

According to Dr. Michael Rachlis, nursing staff and cleaners are often the first to be cut when hospitals have a budget crunch. Yet studies show hospitals are spending $100 million a year treating patients with antibiotic resistant infections they contracted in the hospital.

Read more about the economics of these infections here in "The Economic Impact of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus in Canadian Hospitals", from the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology.

CBC News' Investigative Unit has visited several Canadian hospitals and gathered disturbing information about their cleanliness and the lack of shared information between hospitals.

The Public Health Agency of Canada puts out a Canada Communicable Disease Report once a month. In the February issue, they looked at the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program (CNISP) and its latest results. The CNISP has been in place since January 1995.

In 2003, 38 hospitals participated in the CNISP across nine provinces. According to the Report, MRSA rates are 10 times higher than they were when the CNISP process started in 1995.

Other countries are also paying attention to their own MRSA rates. The UK Department of Health has posted its latest statistical data as of March 7, 2005. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. has put up a new page describing what it is doing about MRSA

Based on its own research, the Canadian Association for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Disease (CACMID) recently said on its website "There are serious gaps in infection control in Canadian hospitals."

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