By Betsy McCaughey
Tuesday, 18 Apr 2017 03:07 PM
Going into a hospital? It’s getting riskier, because of drug-resistant infections — the kind almost no drug can cure. Despite one federal government action plan after another, the germs are winning. Government authorities are clueless about how many infections there are, or how many patients are dying.
Alarming new research shows one of the deadliest bugs, nicknamed CRE, is actually striking three times more patients than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tells us. One lesson from the war against AIDS — level with the public about the enormity of a problem if you want to start defeating it.
Government authorities are doing the opposite, helping hospitals conceal superbug outbreaks from the public and deliberately leaving infections off death certificates.
Within three decades, these bugs will kill more people globally than all cancers and diabetes combined, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). These germs attack young and old. Researchers report an "ominous" seven-fold increase in drug-resistant infections over eight years among hospitalized children in the U.S.
There are at least a dozen lethal superbugs the CDC has labelled "nightmare bacteria." They’re causing tens of thousands of deaths a year in American hospitals. But you wouldn’t know it, reading death certificates. At least half the time, the infection that actually killed the patient is omitted.
