Untreatable infections already kill patients in Canada. Now, physicians worry more are at risk.
Amina Zafar · CBC News
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Barr, a 67-year-old electrical contractor, needed many blood transfusions for internal bleeding and a series of procedures to get through the transplant and its complications, including an incision infection that couldn’t be seen on the skin.
Increasingly, physicians worry that infections that typically kill people with weakened immune systems will expand to hit Canadians going in for routine surgery, especially as cases of drug-resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens become more common.
Drug or antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria, viruses or fungi evolve over time and ultimately stop responding to the treatments that once killed them, making infections harder to treat.
For infectious disease physicians like Dr. Ilan Schwartz, the concern is that people coming to hospital for scheduled surgeries will also acquire infections that are untreatable or extremely difficult to control.
Drug-resistant microbes, like bacteria and fungi, tend to travel in the same circles, Schwartz said, including in health-care settings around the world, where misuse and overuse of antibiotics and antifungals is rampant.
Last week, the Council of Canadian Academies released a report, Overcoming Resistance, on encouraging pharmaceutical companies to make high-value drugs available in this country.
The original article contains 1,282 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 87%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I realize this is an odd complaint, but I really wish the “here’s why” headline format would die already