New antibiotic is our best hope since penicillin in fighting infection

HEALTH Minister Leo Varadkar’s plan to take patients on trolleys out of A&E and put them, together with their trolleys, on wards, can be criticised, but medically it would have advantages. 

A&E is where the vulnerable meet the voracious. The vulnerable being the elderly and the sick, whose immunity is compromised. The voracious being the bugs carried by other patients in A&E. Never the twain should meet, but meet they do, and rather more often in A&E than in ordinary hospital wards.

This turns the emergency department into an intensified version of the infection-control problem in every healthcare system in the world.