Unless hospitals and other health care facilities begin cooperatively fighting the country’s most aggressive antibiotic-resistant germs, infection rates could increase as much as 10 percent over the next five years, hitting about 340,000 people annually, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released today.
Individual institutional efforts, the study said, will not be sufficient to combat these germs. Part of the problem, it notes, is that they are spreading as infected patients move between hospitals, nursing homes and long-term care facilities. For the most part, however, efforts to catch and prevent these infections are being done autonomously.
