Last week, UCLA Medical Center notified 179 patients that it had potentially exposed them to a fearsome “superbug,” and urged them to get tested.
The hospital accidentally infected seven people in procedures involving specialized endoscopes, called duodenoscopes, that proved difficult to thoroughly clean. Two of the people died.
The “superbug” at issue — carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE — is the latest and most difficult to treat in a series of superbugs that includes MRSA and VRE. Such bacteria are the Frankensteinian result of our misusing antibiotics over many decades, and beating them back will require the kind of surveillance and coordination that might have prevented them in the first place.
We might not have much more than dumb luck to thank for the fact that the CRE superbug hasn’t spread to most American hospitals yet. Duodenoscopes are among the least likely routes for spreading CRE, given that the pathogen can contaminate most any surface in a hospital room, but our lack of coordinated attention to this detail, among others, is infecting people nonetheless.
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