More than 800 people contracted C-difficile over a four-month period this summer
,
REDUCING THE levels of the deadly superbug C-difficile in Irish hospitals will take decades, HSE chief executive Brendan Drumm has warned as new figures show more than 800 people contracted the bacterium across the State over a four-month period this summer.
Prof Drumm said that reducing rates of superbugs C-difficile and MRSA in Irish hospitals would prove “a huge challenge” in the years ahead though he stressed that they were very different types of illnesses with C-difficile posing a greater threat in hospitals.
Prof Drumm said he had once been criticised for saying that C-difficile was a more dangerous challenge than MRSA but events in the UK had since borne that out and the British health authorities had now embarked on a publicity campaign to highlight the dangers of C-difficile.
Prof Drumm said C-difficile was much more lethal and had been around for 20-30 years and was much more associated with a lack of proper cleanliness in hospitals, while MRSA was more associated with the high rate of antibiotics in the community.
Nordic countries traditionally had low level of antibiotic prescription and low MRSA rates compared with the much higher MRSA rates in Ireland and the UK where GPs were under pressure through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to prescribe antibiotics, he said.
But C-difficile was also an issue in the Nordic countries because it was a more complex problem involving hospital cleanliness, patient numbers and inter-patient contact and involved staff handwashing and greater emphasis on hospital hygiene, he said.
MRSA, in contrast, posed a challenge not just for those working in hospitals but for the general community as well as for general practitioners who for decades often prescribed antibiotics when they may not have been necessary, he said.
Prof Drumm was speaking at the HSE South Regional Forum in Cork where director of public health, Dr Elizabeth Keane, presented a report on both C-difficile and MRSA cases in both public and private Irish acute hospitals.
According to figures co-ordinated by the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC), there were some 867 cases of C-difficile diseases or associated diseases reported to the authorities during the four-month period from May 4th, 2008, to August 30th, 2008.
C-difficile was categorised a notifiable disease under the Infectious Disease regulations on May 4th last and the figures which were inputted into the HPSC’s Computerised Infectious Disease Reporting system show that Dublin had the highest incidence with 317 reported cases.
Cork had the next highest incidence with 135 reported cases followed by Mayo with 62 cases, Donegal with 47, Galway with 40, Wicklow with 31, Tipperary with 28, Kildare with 25, Limerick with 23 and Roscommon with 22 cases.