Super Bugs -Pan Drug Resistant Bacteria

States that said they do track deaths generally do so for only a few types of drug-resistant infections and not consistently. In the survey, they reported a combined total of about 3,300 deaths from 2003 to 2014.

That’s a tiny fraction of the actual toll: A Reuters analysis of death certificates found that nationwide, drug-resistant infections were mentioned as contributing to or causing the deaths of more than 180,000 people during the same period. To conduct the analysis, Reuters worked with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics’ Division of Vital Statistics to search text descriptions on death certificates to identify relevant deaths.

comment: CDC reporting of actual deaths in relationship to the Flu is only a very small number and during the off-season there are no weekly reports at all from late May until October.

We are reaching a point where many very dangerous viruses and bacteria are totally resistant to everything we have and many many people die because of this.

During the Swine Flu Pandemic I was told by one health official there was no point in reporting high numbers of deaths because "there was nothing they could do to prevent it and why scare people?".

The improper use of anti-biotics has created these bugs. The chances of catching them in the hospital has become so great that many doctors do not want to do invasive surgery and have stopped the totally open surgeries of the past.

In a time of the declining quality of health care, hospitals are becoming dangerous places, especially for the elderly. You are more likely to catch something in a hospital than in your everyday life and the longer you are in there, the more chance you have of getting a disease that will kill you far quicker than any condition you went in for.

For the most part, politician have stopped talking about viruses, Pandemics, or superbugs since the Ebola epidemics in Africa several years ago.

What if Zika become a nastier virus and we are caught flat footed as they still battle to pass money to fight it in the U.S.?

Once when I had Swine Flu and babies were dying in the ER lobby as well as young children, I was put in a room, no vitals taken over hours, no medicines given of any kind. I was put there to die as the entire ER was swamped with patients. Why? Because that year the vaccine did not match up with the strain of flu, and they had nothing to give you for Swine Flu.

We near the end of the antibiotic age where drugs like Penicillin - still given- are worthless. Our current health survelliance system is poor funded and samples taken so few in so few states it does not accurately tell us how many people die from Super Bugs.

While we talk of building walls to protect ourselves from immigrants, the nastiest meanest immigrant of all is the virus which spreads from undeveloped countries in the tropics to the U.S. and other Western nations from the 3rd World.

Someday we will see a The Stand bug which becomes Pandemic which puts the 1918 Pandemic to shame in terms of lives lost.

Not if - but when.

Medclinician