A strain of superbug is on the rise at Royal Inland Hospital and Vernon’s Jubilee Hospital — but on the decline at hospitals in Kelowna and Penticton.
Through a freedom of information request, KTW has learned there are cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) at Royal Inland, Vernon Jubilee, Kelowna General and Penticton Regional hospitals.
At RIH from 2006 to 2007, there were 11 health-care associated MRSA cases.
This number rose to 17 in 2007-2008.
Vernon Jubilee also saw an increase in MRSA, jumping from seven in 2006-2007 to 24 reported cases in 2007-2008.
Hospitals in Kelowna and Penticton had a decline in cases; Kelowna documenting 25 in 2007-2008, compared to 47 in 2006-2007, and Penticton seeing four cases in 2007-2008 and seven in 2006-2007.
According to the Interior Health Authority, while the statistics have been gathered at the specific hospitals, the actual cases of MRSA may have originated at any facility in the world.
MRSA is usually found on the skin and in the noses of healthy people, to which is it harmless, but can cause infection if it gets into the body through a cut or during a surgery and is passed to other patients because of contaminated hands.
The bacteria causing the infections are impervious to antibiotics, creating strains of superbugs that can cause serious illness or death if caught by elderly, the very young and those with compromised immune systems.
The predominant overuse of antibiotics for minor illnesses and sickness — for which they’re useless — is the reason for the bacteria’s resistance and mutation.
Overall, the total number of MRSA cases at the four hospitals declined, to 70 in 2007-2008 from 72 in 2006-2007.
However, KTW was not given the number of deaths as a result of MRSA infections, as the IHA said it’s not possible to tell which diagnosis was the biggest contributor to the death because the types of patients who become ill or suffer symptoms from MRSA usually have other illnesses.
Despite the fact hand washing is the single-most effective way to prevent the spread of communicable diseases and infections, KTW reported Wednesday that more than half of all health-care workers within the IHA aren’t washing their hands — and doctors are one of the worst offenders.
Janice deHeer, the IHA’s corporate director for infection, prevention and control, said a hospital can be “an easy place for things to spread around.”
If person tests positive for an infection, deHeer said they are put on “contact precaution” and health-care workers who come in contact use gloves and gowns, make sure to not sharing equipment between patients and engage in thorough hand washing
“By putting those precautions in place, we’re preventing the spread from patient to patient,” she said.
“Good hand washing still the most important thing we can do to stop that spread. We need to really focus on that hand washing.”
Without proper hand hygiene, the microbes breed in hospitals, easily infecting people already weakened by other illnesses.
Every year, one in nine Canadians become ill with infections while in hospital. That’s a quarter-million people and, of those, as many as 12,000 will die. The annual cost to the health-care system is estimated at $1 billion.
DeHeer said the IHA screens patients as they enter hospitals, to determine if they have been in another health-care facility in the past three months.
“If they say yes, then we culture those patients, do swabs of them,” she said.
If a patient tests positive, it is assumed it is a health care-associated infection.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean they got it at one of our facilities,” deHeer said.
“It could have been in a hospital in Singapore or California. It could be we’re picking more up from travelling or coming in from other facilities, but it’s a fairly small increase.”
She said the health authority has a surveillance system which it is are “fine-tuning” to better screen patients and detect MRSA and other infections.
However, these superbugs are no longer confined to hospitals and there’s a troubling emergence of community-associated (CA) MRSA being recorded across Canada.
During the last couple of years, two drug-resistant forms of the bug have spread into communities and generally cause pimples, hard-to-treat skin, soft-tissue infections and weeping wounds that won’t heal.
Occasionally, they can also lead to large boil-like infections that can cause hemorrhagic pneumonia — flesh-eating disease — in rare cases and even death in previously healthy people.
Continual skin-to-skin contact, crowding and poor hygiene are believed to facilitate the bugs’ spread.
“It’s important for us to know what’s happening in the community because those people could be coming into our facility,” deHeer said.
“It’s sort of a barometer, if you will, of what’s in the community is what may be happening at our hospitals.”
Although there have been cases of infections among athletes and children, groups at high-risk for infection are the homeless or residents of homeless shelters, intravenous drug users, crack cocaine smokers, prison inmates and men who have sex with men.
In Kamloops, there was a large decrease in reported CA-MRSA cases, with 70 in 2006-2007 and only five in 2007-2008.
Penticton had a marginal decline, going from 43 cases in 2006-2007 to 39 in 2007-2008.
Kelowna reported 92 more instances in 2007-2008, with a total of 203 CA-MRSA cases, as did Vernon, with a total of 131, up 71 from 2006-2007.
Again, the number of deaths from CA-MRSA weren’t available.
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