Hospital Superbugs Kill Hundreds of Thousands of Americans Annually

So-called ‘superbug’ infections, common in hospitals that routinely violate sanitary norms, kill hundreds of thousands Americans annually, a fact that many in the US healthcare industry quietly chose to accept as the new normal.

According to recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data, some 75,000 US citizens every year are recorded as having died of infections acquired while in healthcare facilities.

A 2014 study by scientists at University of Michigan indicates, however, that those official statistics do not reflect the true number of deaths related to infection, as many hospitals do not accurately complete death certificates to reflect the infectious epidemic.

Chen McMullen, a Californian, saw her 75-year-old mother infected with a vicious CRKP (carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumonia) bacteria while being treated at the Torrance Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles County.

CRKP, designated by CDC as one of the most dangerous health threats in the US, killed the elderly woman after three weeks of unsuccessful treatment. But doctors stated in her death certificate that an ulcer, the initial reason for her hospitalization, was the cause of death.

After turning to county officials, McMullen learned that CRKP is a type of infection that hospitals are not required to report. “‘It’s everywhere,’” Chen quoted the county health care official saying, in an interview with LA Times.

Despite the CDC recommendation, healthcare facilities are not required to report fatal in-house infections. LA County stopped requiring that data in 2012, “due to resource limitations,” according to LA Times.

A recent survey by Reuters indicted US states have very loose regulations on tracking lethal superbug infections. Less than a half of the states require medical facilities to report deaths caused by the carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) bacteria of the CRKP superbug family.

The actual number of deaths due to sepsis, a life-threatening condition that arises when blood is infected, is 381,000, or some 40 percent higher than official statistics, the CDC assessed earlier this year.

At the same time, some 37 percent of sepsis hospitalizations in America are those in which an infection was acquired in the medical facility, according to official figures. Sepsis is just one of many terminal infections caused by lax sanitary and procedural standards.

The loose regulations also contribute to the ability of some hospital administrators to improve infection-linked death-rate statistics at a medical facility.

The CDC reported in October 2015 that they had identified hospitals that knowingly prevented personnel from reporting to a national database some types of hospital-caught infections.

Dr. Barry Farr, former president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America pointed out that the increasing infection-caused death rate is a long-term problem that administrators and hospital owners do not want to address.

“We, the community of physicians, had been watching these patients die and trundling them off to the morgue for years,” he told LA Times. “Now we’re in the eighth verse of the same song.”

Farr noted that the number of deaths could be significantly decreased if hospitals monitored employee infection control procedures, including simply washing hands.

According to Dr. Martin Makary, a Baltimore surgeon, unreported fatal infections are the third-highest cause of fatalities in America. This indicates ‘medical care going wrong’ and the problem is in urgent need of a solution.

“We need an open and honest conversation about the problem,” Makary said.