Sunday, October 14, 2007

Nurses Did Not Wash Hands, Blamed for Deaths of 90 British Patients

Another socialized medicine success story....

Unclean and uncaring nurses in the U.K. are blamed may have spread superbugs that led the deaths of the patients they were charged with caring for.

The nurses are accused of not washing their hands and of leaving patients lying in soiled beds. They were cited in an official report blaming mismanagement for the deaths of 90 people who contracted a bacterial infection in hospitals in southern England.

The report into the spread of the highly contagious bacterium said nurses at three hospitals run by the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS trust were often too busy to wash their hands and left patients in their own excrement.

In recent years, Britain's superbug infection rates of bacteria like Clostridium difficile and MRSA have skyrocketed. In the 1990s, only 5 percent of in-hospital blood infections were from MRSA, the deadly bacteria resistant to nearly every available antibiotic. In past years, that figure has jumped to more than 40 percent. Critics blame the rise on overstretched hospitals that do not have enough money or capacity to catch superbug infections early.

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