Nightmare bacteriaPatients infected with drug-resistant bacteria at suburban Chicago hospital

Health authorities in Illinois have placed a suburban Chicago hospital under tight scrutiny after an extremely rare strain of a dangerous drug-resistant strand of flu was found to be connected to a series of operations performed at the hospital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has discovered forty-four cases of Illinois patients infected with a particular bacteria, and thirty-eight of those individuals had all recently undergone an endoscopic procedure at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital, located in Park Ridge west of Chicago, in the past year.

The Daily Mail reports that the bacteria, carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae (CRE), is extremely difficult to treat because it has unusually high levels of tolerance to antibiotics.

Specialists say that the fact that the outbreak has occurred only in people who have recently undergone surgical procedures is not surprising. The CDC Web site states “healthy people usually do not get CRE infections.”

According to the CDC, CRE is a family of over seventy bacteria, such as Klebsiella pneumonia and E. coli, which over time have become resistant to antibiotics known as carbapenems. Medical Daily reports that CRE reports in the past decade have increased fourfold and around 18 percent of long-term healthcare facilities treated a patient that suffered from a CRE infection back in 2012.

“CRE are nightmare bacteria. Our strongest antibiotics don’t work and patients are left with potentially untreatable infections,” CDC Director Tom Frieden said in a statement last March. “Doctors, hospital leaders, and public health must work together now to implement CDC’s “detect and protect” strategy and stop these infections from spreading.”

These specialists note that CRE is usually seen as a mutant form of a urinary tract infection which, if it spreads to the patient’s bloodstream, has a 40 to 50 percent chance of being fatal.

The more pressing question is what is the connection between the Park Ridge hospital and the infection with this rare bacteria.

Physicians say that most patients who get infected with CRE are reliant on breathing machines or catheters, but this does not seem to be the case with the patients infected at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital.

CBS Chicago reports that the patients who face the most immediate risk are those who had an endoscopic procedure on their pancreas or bile ducts between January and September of 2013.

“It’s the largest outbreak that we’ve seen in the U.S. of this bacteria ever,” infectious disease doctor and investigation supervisor Alex Kallen told the Wall Street Journal.

“This is a huge cluster.”

The Mail reports that since the outbreak was spotted, 243 patients – all of them had gone to the hospital for endoscopic procedure — have been tested at the hospital and most of them had traces of exposure to the bug – the technical term is that these patients have been “colonized” — and that the bacteria had lived in their digestive tract but it did not progress into the disease form, meaning that they were fine.

CBS Chicago says that twenty-eight of the tested patients had traces of the organism but did not have an infection.

Ten other patients had both traces of the organism and signs of infection and symptoms of the disease.

The hospital has not released information about the status of these patients, except to say that some of them have been treated with another course of antibiotics in an effort to defeat the bacteria’s high resistance levels.

The CDC said it has not found anything unusual or wrong with the sterilization techniques used by the hospital, but the hospital has decided to take additional precautionary measures.

“To ensure no other patients are at risk, we have moved to gas sterilization for these particular scopes, which exceeds the manufacturer’s recommended cleaning and disinfectant guidelines,” Leo Kelly, Vice President of Medical Management at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital told CBS.