A Minnesota boy and six others are dead due to a superbug at one of the nation's top hospitals. The deadly outbreak started little more than a year ago at the National Institutes of Health Research Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.
The Minnesota boy who recently died is the 19th patient at NIH to get the superbug Klebsiella pneumoniae, or KPC.
It was discovered in August, but the latest case is the first new infection since January. Doctors at NIH are worried this bug survived measures taken to stop its spread.
Dr. Henry Masur, NIH Chief of Critical Care Medicine, says, "We closed units. We constructed walls. We cleaned plumbing."
The Centers for Disease Control says the KPC strain was found in 2001 and has since spread to nearly every state.
Sanford Health is well aware of the most recent death involving the Minnesotan and is doing everything possible to keep patients safe. The hospital says it starts with aggressive prevention.
Joan Cook, the Director of Infection Prevention & Control at Sanford says, "We monitor our hand hygiene. We monitor when patients are in isolation, and look at if we're doing the things that we need to do to protect them."
Sanford electronically flags medical records, if a patient has an antibiotic resistant germ. If the germ crops up, the lab alerts doctors immediately.
Cook says, "It's that very very aggressive isolation process. You may look to see if other patients are carrying it to make sure you're not seeing any transmission occurring."
Cook says, so far, Sanford has been able to treat all known cases of KPC, but she is still on guard because the resistant strains can be created by antibiotic overuse.
"You make sure you have very appropriate usage. You de-escalate the usage, and you get patients off antibiotics when it's no longer indicated," explains Cook.
She says doctors have seen drug resistant organisms for years, and as long they find them, she will make sure the hospital is applying the best practices available to prevent an outbreak here.
The Minnesota Department of Health says typically only people with poor health are vulnerable to these strains.
Between North Dakota and Minnesota there have been 50 reported cases of KPC. Neither state has data for possible deaths.
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