The bacterium Clostridium difficile caused the death of tens of thousands of Americans, researchers found. A breeding ground for deadly bacteria are hospitals, and contribute to its spread antibiotics, which significantly weaken the immune system of patients.
The bacterium Clostridium difficile is an anaerobic gram-positive bacterium that causes the disease pseudomembranous colitis. Clinical manifestations of the disease are variable can be, but most patients are observed intoxication, prolonged diarrhea, abdominal pain and leukocytosis – changing the cellular composition of the blood characterized by an increased number of white blood cells.
In critically ill patients (most of all people suffer from colitis over 65 years) there are disorders of the cardiovascular system – tachycardia and hypotension, disturbed protein metabolism.
The disease can be fatal.
The main cause of pseudomembranous colitis is a misuse of antibiotics: the human immune system is weakened, intestinal microflora die. These are ideal conditions for bacteria Clostridium difficile. Experts from the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, GA) decided to find out exactly how often by people infected with the bacterium. A full report on the work of the doctors was published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
A team of researchers led by Professor Fernando Lessa came to the conclusion that the main breeding ground for Clostridium difficile are hospitals and other medical facilities. However, in the first place, scientists began exploring the causes, directly contributing to the development of colitis. This was indeed the cause of the immune system, weakened by the use of antibiotics. Past studies of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have shown that
30 to 50% of the antibiotics that accept patients in hospitals, or do not need and can not do without them, or incorrectly selected .
This factor alone suggests that half of hospital patients unnecessarily at risk of catching pseudomembranous colitis.
Next, experts studied the statistics on cases of the disease in ten regions of the United States (The study was conducted in 2011). The results indicate that for a year colitis sick 453 thousand. Man, 30 days after diagnosis, died 29,3 thousand. Man. Of these, 15 thousand. Deaths were directly related to colitis, others – emerging on the background of complications of other diseases. 80% of people who died were older than 65 years.
An analysis of case histories of people who have caught pseudomembranous colitis showed that
two thirds of them during infection were at treatment in a hospital or discharged from medical facilities a few days ago.
This fact allowed scientists to argue that hospitals are a real breeding ground for the bacteria Clostridium difficile.
Nevertheless, further doctors found that hospitals were not even responsible for 65-66% of cases of disease. Conducted in 2014 study showed that of the remaining one-third of patients 82% said that they attended medical clinics, such as the dentist or his personal physician, immediately before the sick.
If you add up all the occurrences of colitis occurred after or during their stay in hospital, it turns out that the US health agencies are responsible for more than 90% of cases of infection by the bacterium Clostridium difficile and for tens of thousands of deaths.
The head of research Fernando Lessa states that to resolve this issue it is first necessary to deal with abuse and misuse of antibiotics. Doctors estimated that reduce the use of antibiotics by 30% will reduce the incidence of colitis by 26%. In practice, the results have surpassed even these figures: some hospitals and clinics have managed to reduce the use of harmful to the intestinal microflora of drugs by 10%, thus reducing the number of patients with colitis by as much as 34%.
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