Superbug Is Much Worse Than Mrsa (from This Is Hertfordshire)

Link: Superbug Is Much Worse Than Mrsa (from This Is Hertfordshire).

MORE than one in every 200 inpatients at St George’s Hospital in south London becomes infected with the superbug Clostridium difficile (C. diff), according to the hospital’s own figures.

Last year there were 386 reported cases of C. diff, equivalent to 0.6 per cent of the Tooting hospital’s 61,500 inpatients admitted.

And although there have been impressive reductions in the number of infections, down from 517 two years earlier, the shocking figures reveal that C. diff is a far bigger problem than MRSA, of which St George’s had just 62 reported cases last year.
advertisement

The extremely contagious superbug can cause diarrhoea and sometimes develops into a serious, even fatal, illness. Elderly patients on antibiotics are thought to be particularly vulnerable, due to the depletion of good bacteria in their gut.

However, St George’s does not keep count of the number of patients killed by the superbug.

A hospital spokesman said: "We do not routinely collect on the number of deaths linked to C. diff. However, even if we did, when a person who is very sick dies it is difficult to attribute their death to any one thing. There could be several reasons why they died – an infection may play only a very small part in their death."