CDC Guessing 23K Annual Deaths From Resistant Infections, But Reporting Rules Hardly Even Exist

[hatrack]

EDIT

Doctors and other clinicians also may simply not understand the importance of recording the infections. Sandy Tarant, the doctor who signed Josiah Cooper-Pope’s death certificate, told Reuters that he thought “it didn’t matter” whether he cited a MRSA infection. Legally, he’s right. Most states don’t require doctors to specify whether MRSA was a factor in a death. Washington and Illinois are exceptions.

State laws govern how death certificates are filled out. Most use a model law that mandates financial penalties for anyone who deliberately makes a false statement on the document, said Patricia Potrzebowski, director of the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems. The penalties are often small and rarely enforced, she said.

“AN IMPRESSIONIST PAINTING”

Not even the CDC has a good handle on the extent of the problem. The agency estimates that about 23,000 people die each year from 17 types of antibiotic-resistant infections and that an additional 15,000 die from Clostridium difficile, a pathogen linked to long-term antibiotic use. The numbers are regularly cited in news reports and scholarly papers, but they are mostly guesswork. Reuters analyzed the agency’s math and found that the estimates are based on few actual reported deaths from a drug-resistant infection.

The agency leaned heavily on small samplings of infections and deaths collected from no more than 10 states in a single year, 2011. Most didn’t include populous areas such as Florida, Texas, New York City and Southern California. From those small samples, the CDC then extrapolated most of its national estimates, introducing so much statistical uncertainty into the numbers as to render them useless for the purposes of fighting a persistent public health crisis. Describing the estimates to Reuters, even CDC officials used words like “jerry-rig,” “ballpark figure” and “a searchlight in the dark attempt.”

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http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-uncounted-surveillance/

[KT2000]

1. just complained to our local hospital

about their infection control in the ER. While waiting for a friend I saw a man come in - his leg was bright red and swollen from the knee to the foot. He was obviously in pain when he walked. He told the nurse he was already on antibiotics.
He still had to go through check-in procedures which required him to go to 2 different offices and wait in the waiting area for about an hour. After he went into the ER, a woman came out and wiped down his chair with an antiseptic wipe - and then she proceeded to wipe down all other empty chairs with the same wipe.

The hospital assured me they had good infection control but that is not what I saw - just hope I don't end up in there.