Maryn McKenna

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NDM-1: The World Health Organization warns governments

August 20, 2010 By Maryn Leave a Comment

The World Health Organization released a statement this afternoon, prompted by news of the NDM-1 multi-resistance gene. It’s worth taking a look: The agency recommends that countries around the world pay serious attention to the emergence of this resistance factor.

WHO calls for  broad action within countries, from
hospital infection-control and antibiotic-stewardship programs, to
increased surveillance for the emergence of resistance, to
legislative control of over-the-counter sales. Those sound like (and are) minimal and rational suggestions — but they have the potential to be quite controversial in some countries, from India where OTC antibiotic purchases are a major economic sector, to the US where best practices for hospital control of resistant organisms continue to be, umm, vociferously debated.

The WHO says:

Those called upon to be alert to the problem of antimicrobial resistance and take appropriate action include consumers, prescribers and dispensers, veterinarians, managers of hospitals and diagnostic laboratories, patients and visitors to healthcare facilities, as well as national governments, the pharmaceutical industry, professional societies, and international agencies.

WHO strongly recommends that governments focus control and prevention efforts in four main areas:

  • surveillance for antimicrobial resistance;
  • rational antibiotic use, including education of healthcare workers and the public in the appropriate use of antibiotics;
  • introducing or enforcing legislation related to stopping the selling of antibiotics without prescription; and
  • strict adherence to infection prevention and control measures, including the use of hand-washing measures, particularly in healthcare facilities.

The WHO has been working on antibiotic resistance for a while now, though the effort seems to be continually obscured by urgent news of outbreaks such as SARS, H5N1, H1N1 and so on. Here’s their short fact sheet, detailed program page,  and Global Strategy for Containment of Antibiotic Resistance (sadly 9 years old, so it predates the emergence of community MRSA, not to mention NDM-1).

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: india, NDM-1, stewardship, surveillance, Who

A good start?

April 30, 2010 By Maryn Leave a Comment

I happened to notice today that the WHO has posted an update to its campaign Save Lives: Clean Your Hands, which aims to get 10,000 hospitals around the world to sign on — by May 5, 2010, which is next week — to a global commitment to improved hand hygiene in hospitals.

As of last week, 8,173 hospitals had signed up (1899 in the United States, FYI).

If I sound skeptical, it’s because we all know that merely supporting hand-washing (or the gel equivalent) is an easy thing to do. If you asked any hospital in the US, you would hear 100% support for hand-washing — including in the hospitals where healthcare workers miss 50% of opportunities to wash their hands. It’s in the granular details of implementation — and the relentless laser-like focus on execution practiced, for instance, by Novant Health Care in North Carolina, whose story is told in SUPERBUG — that change really happens.

Whether this WHO campaign can bring that focus and create that change… we’ll just have to see.

The WHO campaign’s page includes videos, guidelines, and plans for a global survey to be executed on May 5.

Filed Under: Science, Science Blogs, Superbug Tagged With: nosocomial, Science Blogs, Who

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