How the feds are letting germs run wild in hospitals


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 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.

Yet 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. 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 United States.

There are at least a dozen lethal superbugs the CDC has labeled “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.

President Obama’s CDC head, Dr. Tom Frieden, resisted requests from victims’ families for honest death certificates. Families urged him to recommend that certificates start documenting when infection caused or contributed to death. But Frieden did nothing. True, it’s each state’s decision, but most follow CDC guidance. The agency and the states are guilty of a coverup mentality.



Last year, MRSA (resistant Staph) raged through the neonatal intensive care unit at UC Irvine Medical Center, sickening 10 newborns. But hospital and county health officials kept the outbreak hushed. The truth came out later, when a hospital employee leaked the information. Consumer Reports rightly insists hospitals should be required to notify the public about outbreaks in real time.


One newer superbug isn’t as common as MRSA, but it’s deadlier. It’s called CRE, short for Carbapenem-resistant bacteria. Patients who get it in their bloodstream have only a 50 percent chance of surviving. That makes it as deadly as Ebola, and it’s right here in local hospitals.

CRE is spreading like wildfire. It increased 800 percent from 2009 to 2015, mostly in New York and surrounding states, though it has reached 44 states in all.

Where’s the Centers for Disease Control? Out to lunch. The agency guesstimated CRE’s threat at less than one third what actual research shows it to be. As a Reuters investigation reveals, the agency’s flim-flam number is based on 6-year-old data from a tiny sampling of hospitals — none from population centers like Florida, New York City, Boston or southern California.

That’s no way to stalk a killer.

To get serious about stopping CRE, hospitals should also be testing incoming patients for the germ. Then, precautions can be taken to prevent patients carrying the germ from spreading it to others, explains Dr. Joshua Thaden of Duke’s medical school.

It’s a no brainer. Except to federal health authorities, who are repeating the mistake made four decades ago, when they failed to recommend testing patients for MRSA and allowed that menace to take hold in hospitals everywhere.

This time, President Trump has an opportunity to start solving this deadly problem by appointing a CDC head who will go to bat for patients, demand honest reporting of infection rates and insist on the truth on death certificates.

Betsy McCaughey is chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths.

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