Nat'l Institutes of Health Clinical Center Superbug -19 cases with 7 deaths

[MuffyBee]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/nih-superbug-claims-7th-victim/2012/09/14/09b3742e-fe9b-11e1-b153-218509a954e1_story.html
NIH superbug claims 7th victim
September 14, 2012

A deadly, drug-resistant superbug outbreak that began last summer at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center claimed its seventh victim Sept. 7, when a seriously ill boy from Minnesota succumbed to a bloodstream infection, officials said Friday.

The boy was the 19th patient at the research hospital to contract an antibiotic-resistant strain of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae that arrived in August 2011 with a New York woman who needed a lung transplant. But his case marked the first new infection of this superbug at NIH since January — a worrisome signal that the bug persists inside the huge brick-and-glass federal facility in Bethesda.

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The NIH clinical center is a federal facility that is not required to report hospital-borne infections to the state. Nor does it have to report this type of infection to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although Gallin said the CDC has been working closely with NIH to help control the outbreak.

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Nationwide, about 6 percent of hospitals are battling outbreaks of this class of superbugs, according to the CDC, which has stepped up nationwide surveillance. Strains similar to those seen at NIH have spread across the world since first appearing in North Carolina in 2001, Gallin said.

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At Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, which is near the NIH clinical center, hospital officials said they have had no outbreaks of drug-resistant Klebsiella. Only once or twice in the past year has there been evidence of such an infection, said Rita Smith, manager of the hospital’s infection control efforts.

The most common drug-resistant infections at Suburban, part of the Johns Hopkins health system, include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, E. coli, and Clostridium difficile.

(2 pg. article)