Greek doctors are fighting a new invisible foe every day at their hospitals: a pneumonia-causing superbug that most existing antibiotics can’t kill. The culprit is spreading through health centers already weighed down by a shortage of nurses. The hospital-acquired germ killed as many as half of people with blood cancers infected at Laiko General Hospital, a 500-bed facility in central Athens.
snipThe culprit is spreading through health centers already weighed down by a shortage of nurses. The hospital-acquired germ killed as many as half of people with blood cancers infected at Laiko General Hospital, a 500-bed facility in central Athens.
The drug-resistant K. pneumoniae bacteria have a genetic mutation that allows them to evade such powerful drugs as AstraZeneca Plc (AZN)’s Merrem and Johnson & Johnson’s Doribax. A 2010 survey found 49 percent of K. pneumoniae samples in Greece aren’t killed by the antibiotics of last resort, known as carbapenems, according to the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network. Many doctors have even tried colistin, a 50-year-old drug so potent that it can damage kidneys.
“We’re not used to seeing people die of an untreatable infection,” said John Rex, vice president for clinical infection at London-based AstraZeneca, which is developing a new generation of antibiotics. “That’s like something in a novel of 200 years ago.”
The superbug is one among many challenges facing the home of the Hippocratic oath, to "do no harm.” The government, confronting a 14.5 billion-euro ($19.3 billion) bond payment on March 20, is trying to arrange financing to avert a collapse of the economy. Partly as a result, the health system is in crisis, with some life-saving drugs in short supply and hospitals struggling to pay their bills. Nurse Ratio
Greece has the lowest nurse-to-patient ratio in Europe and one of the highest rates of antibiotic use -- and abuse -- on the continent, hindering the attack on the infection.
George Daikos, an associate professor of medicine at Laiko General, won one battle last year in the ward for people with leukemia and other blood disorders by separating people carrying the bacteria from uninfected patients and forcing busy nurses to wash their hands more often. Fighting the infection in the rest of the hospital, where one nurse cares for as many as 20 patients, casts Daikos as Sisyphus, the mythological king doomed to roll a boulder up hill, only to watch it tumble down again, over and over for eternity.
“We know what to do, but if you don’t have the personnel, you can’t do it,” Daikos said in an interview in his office, deep in a side wing of the sprawling hospital. “If you don’t have enough nurses, how can I assign a dedicated nurse to carriers?”
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