It is likely to take a couple of years before the rising rates of bloodstream MRSA infections in our hospitals are stabilised, an expert in hospital-acquired infections said yesterday.
Prof Hilary Humphreys, professor of microbiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and a consultant microbiologist at Dublin's Beaumont Hospital, said while it was difficult to put a precise timeframe on controlling the problem he believed it would take years.
"I think you are talking about perhaps some years, certainly a couple of years at the very outset to see the situation stabilised and then maybe after that perhaps see gradual decreases," he said.
He was speaking at the announcement of a four-year research project which will look at where patients pick up MRSA and evaluate new methods of preventing its spread.
MRSA is an antibiotic resistant superbug often acquired in hospitals and it can, if it gets into the bloodstream, prove fatal.
The researchers will look at rapid diagnostic tests becoming available to test people for MRSA before they enter hospital as well as a new vapour technology never before used in the State for disinfecting wards to ensure they are left not just physically clean but also "microbiologically clean".
The study will be based at Beaumont Hospital.
If it is established that the use of all these techniques on a number of wards at Beaumont reduce the incidence of MRSA and another antibiotic-resistant bug called VRE, the researchers will recommend that even if the interventions are costly, they should be used nationwide.
Some €1.5 million has been given to the researchers by the Health Research Board to carry out the study.
"Because the patients are being admitted from the community we are going to get a handle on the issue of what proportion of patients who are identified with MRSA in hospital have actually brought the MRSA into the hospital," Prof Humphreys said.
Prof David Coleman, professor of microbiology at the microbiology research unit in the Dublin Dental School, said there were many factors which contributed to our rate of MRSA, including hospital overcrowding and lack of resources such as isolation facilities. "The success of other countries, a lot of it has been down to having very good isolation facilities," he said.
He added that people visiting hospitals needed to be educated to use the hand hygiene gels available to prevent the spread of infection. Hand hygiene wasn't just an issue for staff, he stressed.
At present he said it could take two days to determine if a patient was carrying MRSA, whereas new diagnostic tests could confirm a diagnosis in three hours. "There are some of them available commercially but they are very, very expensive and our preliminary evaluations are showing that they are not precise enough to detect all MRSA so part of this project will evaluate products . . . and we can then make a recommendation," he said.
The Republic has among the highest rates of MRSA infection in Europe. Close to 600 patients tested positive for MRSA bloodstream infections in Irish hospitals in 2005.