Superbug scandal - MRSA shame highlights ailing system

Professor Brendan Drumm, head of the Health Service Executive (HSE) candidly stated the superbug, MRSA, or methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, would never be fully wiped out in our hospitals.

It is so difficult to tackle at this point that a concerted five-year programme would be unlikely to cut the prevalence of the bug by more than 20%. It seems strange that he should suggest something as fundamental as hospital staff washing their hands as the first step in tackling the problem, seeing that the bug is passed on mostly through hand contact.

The problem was highlighted this week with a second death attributed to MRSA. There is already talk about a likely epidemic of litigation as people sue our hospitals for the transmission of MRSA through neglect, because of the failure of so many hospitals to implement 1995 guidelines to deal with the problem.

In an interview on RTÉ’s lunchtime news yesterday, Professor Hajo Grundmann of the National Institute for Public Health in the Netherlands, stated that instances of MRSA have been kept low by an aggressive policy of screening and isolation. They isolate patients until they know that they are not carriers of the bug in Holland.

He attributed part of the problem in this country to overcrowding in our hospitals, which means that isolating patients is much more difficult.

Professor Grundmann mentioned that Ireland has some of the highest instances of antibiotic resistant MRSA bugs. That was the bad news, he said, adding: “The good news is that it cannot get much higher.”

It is an indictment of our health service and cold comfort for long-suffering taxpayers to be told that the good news is that we cannot get much worse.