MRSA forces ward to halt admissions
MICHAEL BLACKLEY

FEARS over the MRSA intensified yesterday when a hospital ward cancelled admissions because of a rise in cases of the bug. Glasgow’s Western Infirmary took the decision to stop taking admissions at its cardiothoracic unit after four incidences of MRSA were found in patients within the ward.

The hospital’s microbiology and infection control teams were last night supervising a thorough deep-clean of the ward, and they expected it would be admitting new patients again today. A spokeswoman for NHS Greater Glasgow confirmed that the patients had different MRSA infections of the skin, making it likely that they had contracted the bug outside the hospital. She said: "Because they all have different strains of MRSA this is not an outbreak.

"We screen all our patients as a matter of routine and that is how we discovered that they had the bug. "The infection control that we have in place is innovative and radical and it is making great strides. MRSA can never be entirely eradicated but we can make great efforts to reduce it." The four patients that were found to have contracted MRSA were said to be "stable and responding well to treatment".

The assertion that the patients entered the hospital with the bug is in line with recent research that shows a huge increase in cases of community-acquired MRSA (CA-MRSA). Two weeks ago, a leading doctor said that there had been around 30,000 cases of CA-MRSA in Scotland.
However, Jacqui Reilly, a consultant epidemiologist at Health Protection Scotland, yesterday said this form of MRSA tended to be skin-related and did not move into the blood.

Although she said the symptoms were less extreme than MRSA-bacterium, she admitted that in some cases it was necessary to close wards.

She said: "If the infection control team in any situation deem that there is a more than acceptable number of cases in a ward then it would be a responsible decision to close that ward.

"But the decision remains with individual hospitals and they will have their own policies to deal with it." She added that it was the responsibility of the patient, as well as the hospital, to protect themselves against MRSA, both in the community and in the hospital.
People with colds or other illnesses should not visit patients in hospital, she said. Also, visitors should ensure they wash their hands before entering hospital and should not sit on beds in wards.

Three patients scheduled for operations at the cardiothoracic ward at the Western Infirmary were transferred to the Golden Jubilee National Hospital to prevent a delay to their surgery. Another patient will be treated today, while another ten will be rescheduled for the next two weeks.

NHS Greater Glasgow’s Consultant in Public Health Medicine, Dr Syed Ahmed, added: "All patients admitted to the unit are screened for MRSA as standard practice so added precautionary measures can be taken to prevent infection."

POLITICAL point-scoring over MRSA means that policies to tackle the superbug are failing to address the issue, experts said yesterday. The government’s focus on pleasing the public "means its policies are missing the point", says an editorial in the Lancet medical journal. "With a general election looming, all major political parties in the UK have seized on public fears about the health implications of unclean hospitals to fuel arguments over rising rates of infection with MRSA," it was claimed. "This tit-for-tat political posturing has certainly helped keep health in the public eye.

"But none of these policies reflect the real failure in UK hospitals: non-adherence to basic infection control." According to the latest figures, 3,519 patients developed MRSA in NHS hospitals in the six months up to September 2004. Last week MRSA was thrown into the political spotlight once again after it emerged that 36-hour-old baby Luke Day had died from the superbug in Ipswich Hospital.