KEY POINTS:
District health boards around the country have been notified to help deal with a serious bacteria which has been discovered in Auckland Hospital.
Cleaners yesterday finished cleaning every hard surface in Auckland Hospital after the contagious bug vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) was found in August.
VRE is not generally harmful, unless it infects a person's bloodstream, when it can be difficult to treat and sometimes life-threatening.
Waikato Hospital said today it was screening any patients transferred from Auckland Hospital for the bug, and it expects other hospitals have set up their own strategies.
"We instigated normal infection control procedures once Auckland came to us about VRE," hospital spokeswoman Mary Anne Gill told NZPA.
"I'm sure other DHBs have their own standard procedures to deal with this type of event."
Ms Gill said she was not aware of any patients having transferred from Auckland since they were notified.
She said there had been about six cases of VRE notified in Waikato Hospital over the past 10 years, the last in 2005. None of them involved any cross-infection, which is when the bug is most likely to be a threat to patients.
An Auckland District Health Board spokeswoman confirmed all hospitals had been notified about VRE so they could implement their own ways to deal with it.
Of more than 1000 patients tested for VRE since its discovery at Auckland Hospital in August, three people were found to be infected by the bacteria. Two of them died, though Auckland DHB stressed their deaths were not the direct result of VRE but of other more serious illnesses.
The tests at Auckland City Hospital also showed up 33 carriers, most of whom would have acquired VRE in the hospital but at least four had brought it in with them.
Auckland DHB chief medical officer Dr David Sage said the bug was not a problem for healthy people and people often carried it in their system without being affected.
However, he said it could cause serious health problems for sick people whose immune systems were low.
"They will not get ill as a result. It essentially is intestinal bacteria that everyone has. The only difference is that it is more resistant to antibiotics."
Dr Sage said the cost of the cleaning and eradication of the bug would be tens of thousands of dollars and the testing regime was also "quite expensive".
All patients admitted to the hospital in the next two to four months will be screened for the bug.
Green Party health spokeswoman Sue Kedgley said the outbreak of VRE was a wakeup call for New Zealand and highlighted the need for urgent testing and research into antibiotic resistance.
"The Auckland Hospital outbreak may well be only the tip of the iceberg, but there is no way of knowing if antibiotic resistant bugs exist in communities outside hospitals, in live animals or in meat destined for human consumption," she said.
"In fact no one has a clear idea of the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in New Zealand, because there is very little testing done at all.
"Health authorities have not been undertaking the necessary testing and have not been treating this public health issue with the urgency that it demands."
She also called for more regularly testing for antibiotic resistance in animals being fed antibiotics as some scientists had attributed the emergence of superbugs in part to the use of antibiotics in the feed of healthy animals.
"We also need to prohibit the routine feeding of antibiotics to animals that are not sick," Ms Kedgley said.
"The spread of antibiotic resistance will undermine many important medical advances of the last 150 years. Society can never regain the effectiveness of antibiotics, if they are lost in this way."
- NZPA
