Canada is reporting that methicillin-resistant staphylococcus (MRSA) infected at least 5,000 people last year.

Of those 5,000 cases, 800 led to serious infections, and somewhere between 25 and 50 per cent of patients died from direct or indirect causes of those infections.

Quebec hospitals are trying to find ways to combat this highly infectious bacterium. Five years ago, only a handful of hospitals were fighting MRSA, Radio-Canada reports. Now, according to government documents acquired under the access to information laws, almost every hospital in the province is fighting the superbug.

MRSA usually strikes the elderly and the extremely sick. Infectious disease specialist Marie Gourdeau says the situation with the superbug is very troubling, and that if it is not contained, hospitals will be fighting superbugs resistant to all antibiotics.

Testing is the key

Some cases can be easily prevented, Gourdeau says, but notes the more cases there are, the harder it is to control. Health officials say increased testing among patients is key to making sure the superbug does not spread through hospitals.

Unlike C. difficile, the superbug that came to the public’s attention over the past few years, MRSA can only live for a couple of hours outside of the human body. MRSA can be easily eliminated using common disinfectants. However, it is easily transmitted, from person to person, or by infected medical instruments. National problem Hospitals across the country are failing to control superbug infections that kill 8,000 patients each year and cost health-care systems at least $100 million annually, a CBC News investigation has learned.

Yet infection control budgets are the first to be cut when money gets tight, some doctors say, despite the rising frequency of antibiotic-resistant infections caused by bacteria such as C. difficile or MRSA.

Statistics

The incidence of hospital-acquired MRSA has increased tenfold in less than a decade. Since 2003, C. difficile has killed more than 600 people in Quebec alone, most of them elderly or very sick patients. Add in necrotizing fasciitis and the statistics show 250,000 Canadians are getting sick from preventable infections every year. Such infections kill more North Americans annually than breast cancer, traffic accidents and AIDS combined. Many fatal infections preventable Despite the wake-up call that SARS gave to the Toronto area in 2003, Niagara public health officer Dr. Douglas Sidar says infection control still does not receive enough attention in Canada’s hospitals. “People die from these infections—which technically, almost certainly, in many instances can be prevented,” said Sidar.

He thinks hospitals must wake up to the need for proper infection control—including nurses who know how to recognize the signs of an infection and enough cleaning staff to keep commonly touched surfaces free of bacterial contamination. Sidar also said more should be done to track down the source of an infection when an outbreak occurs so that the hospital doesn’t keep making people sick. A big part of the problem is the lack of controls over infection surveillance in hospitals, says Dr. Michael Rachlis, who studies and writes books about Canada’s health-care system. “We have become complacent about infectious diseases,” he said. “We certainly got reminded in the ‘80s, with AIDS, that the plagues are always around and threaten us, but in general we are not afraid of germs.” Infection control budgets are still treated like low-hanging fruit, he said, with cleaning and nursing staff the first items to be cut when hospitals experience a financial crunch.