Hospital-Based Super-Bugs

"The impact on patients has reached a dangerous level. Patients are now dying from infections that physicians have been successfully treating for decades."
Ontario Medical Association report

The report issued by the OMA  addresses itself to the issue of the common animal husbandry practise in modern farming techniques of using antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals. Along with other modern practices common in society now, like the casual and promiscuous use of anti-bacterial cleaning agents, careless antibiotics use, in administering them to animals has helped create an environment where bacteria thrive, the result being the creation of super-bugs.

These super-bugs are bacteria that have evolved steadily and with great gusto, making them impervious to antibiotic regiments. Hospitals have been invaded with superbugs like MRSA (methicillin-resistantStaphylococcus aureus) and Cl. difficile, affecting a multitude of common infections from strep throat to salmonella. Ill people, people suffering from the effects of various types of disease and infections tend to cluster within hospital settings.

The hospital setting itself becomes a vector for the viral spread of harmful bacteria. Those in the know at one time were aware that a hospital setting, despite all attempts to ensure it is perpetually well cleansed of bacteria, is never the sterile place that people like to assume it to be; safe and comfortable and free of the potential of infection. As hospital operating costs steadily rise, attention to adequately cleaning areas prone to hosting bacteria may fall below optimum control.

And the rising incidents of more resistant types of bacteria, added to simple oversight in cleanliness create the conditions for a perfect storm. People entering hospital environs already suffering from a range of serious illnesses, spend longer in hospital now because of bacterial infection. And the situation is international in scope, raising alarms everywhere.

In Britain, its chief medical officer claimed the threat of super-bugs to be as great as that posed by terrorism - a "ticking time bomb". Scientists in South Africa recently published a study of their own documenting a lethal new strain of tuberculosis resistance for which all antibiotics have proven to be ineffective.

In Canada it is becoming increasingly common for doctors to see people with resistant urinary-tract infections, ending up on intravenous treatment. Children ending up with scarlet fever because their strep throat conditions return repeatedly. Individuals with the super-bug Vancomycin-resistance enterococcus are seen to be more likely to be hospitalized and experience a higher death rate than others, once in a hospital setting.

"We are definitely pouring fuel on the fire by this culture of believing anti-microbials are [always] safe", said Dr. Lynora Saxinger, infectious disease specialist at University of Alberta, who sees the issue of unknown quantities of antibiotics used on farms, and the tendency to over-prescribe antibiotics to people, as critical to the situation.

Bacteria genetics alter themselves in response to exposure to drugs, particularly in non-lethal concentrations where antibiotics just 'affect' the bacteria rather than killing them outright, resulting in resistance, explains Dr. Saxinger. The unnecessary and inappropriate use of drugs has reached crisis proportions, seen in the growing prevalence of these super-bugs resistant to the most advanced strains of antibiotics.

Some bacteria, like E.coli and salmonella are known to move from animals to humans. Resistant bugs can be passed along through meat and other foods. All become exacerbated by the habit of farmers using antibiotics to prevent infections and promote growth in healthy animals. A kind of pro-active treatment that has dire consequences for society as a whole.

The prophylactic use of antibiotics in agriculture has been banned by the European Union, and the U.S. government has placed some curbs on the practise. A group representing Canada's poultry producers claim its members are concerned about the issue, but they feel it is not clear that farm use of the drugs is a problem.

The OMA report does acknowledge that a ban could have a short-term negative effect on farmers. But they point to the fact that European producers facing a similar outcome with the proscription against the use of farm-based antibiotic use in animals were able to recover swiftly, changing to other practises to ensure their animals remained healthy.