A drug-resistant superbug is making its way throughout Seattle, sickening dozens of people.
People across Seattle were infected by a drug-resistant bacteria, including the rare Carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae. Germs from the virus is spreading from patient-to-patient in the hospital by endoscopes used to treat liver and pancreatic illnesses, Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, a senior official at Public Health - Seattle & King County, told Reuters.
The highly-contageous disease is hard for doctors to treat, as the virus does not respond to antibiotics. It usually occurs in hospitals, nursing homes, and other healthcare settings. Patients whose care requires devices such as ventilators (breathing machines), urinary (bladder) catheters, or intravenous (vein) catheters, and patients who are taking long courses of certain antibiotics are most at risk for CRE infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Similar diseases have contaminated Pittsburgh (2012) and Chicago (2014) in recent years, but the virus was never able to be traced back to a particular facility, reported Reuters.
"This is a national problem," Virginia Mason Medical Center said in a statement. "We determined that the endoscope manufacturer's, as well as the federal government's, recommended guidelines for processing the scopes are inadequate."
The Virginia Mason Medical Center now a rigorous decontamination process that exceeds national standards to avoid having such an untreatable virus show up in their facility.
It's unclear how many people have actually been exposed to the virus.
Neither hospital nor local health officials notified the public about the superbug because "there was not a strong rationale for doing so," Duchin told Reuters.
