Published June 30, 2011 by Blythe Bernhard –St. Louis Dispatch, interview with Jeanine Thomas
Death certificates in Illinois will soon reflect what patient safety advocates say has been a secret killer — staph infections that are resistant to antibiotics.
Under the new law, health care providers who fill out the certificates will have to include the presence of methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, known as MRSA, and other infections that are resistant to multiple drugs if they contributed to or caused a death.
Gov. Pat Quinn is expected to sign the bill into law.
Illinois would become the second state after Washington to require the infections be included on death certificates when appropriate.
MRSA is a prevalent staph bacteria that can cause skin, ear, nose and throat infections when acquired through close contact — typically in dorms, jails, day care centers and locker rooms.
More serious MRSA infections can occur in hospitalized patients with compromised immune systems following surgeries or other procedures that allow the bacteria to enter the body and cause blood infections and pneumonia.
Hospitals have been working to reduce the number of infections through improved hygiene but have historically been reluctant to acknowledge their existence through permanent medical records.
While more than half the states, including Illinois and Missouri, require some reporting of hospital-acquired infection rates, the number of deaths from the infections is still hard to track.
A federal estimate from 2007 reported close to 100,000 infections and 18,650 deaths in the U.S. caused by invasive staph infections annually.
Advocates say the real numbers are likely much higher, and the reporting on death certificates is a step toward more accurate data.
“That information is used to direct public funds toward fixing problems,” said Lisa McGiffert, director of Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project. “There has never been a documentation for medication errors and infections in death statistics, and that is a big reason why so little money has been spent on trying to solve this problem of preventable medical harm.”
Aside from the statistical importance of acknowledging infections, families will have a more accurate record of their loved one’s death.
“Having seen their family member suffer from something that was preventable and seeing the death certificate says they died of a heart attack, it’s one more painful experience,” McGiffert said.
Nicole Coffin, a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said most states’ death data, provided by hospitals, can already be searched for infections, such as MRSA and tuberculosis, although “accuracy is definitely an issue because there’s a lot of variability based on what pathologists list.”
Coffin said the CDC uses other state and national surveillance methods to track the infections.
Jeanine Thomas runs the MRSA Survivors Network in Hinsdale, Ill., and worked with state Rep. Patricia Bellock, R-Westmont, sponsor of the Illinois legislation.
Thomas, who developed a severe MRSA infection after ankle surgery in 2000, said that when she found out MRSA was not yet a reportable disease, it felt dehumanizing.
“You’re not worth counting, you’re nameless, faceless, not even a statistic,” she said.
Thomas said the new law is a start in understanding how big a problem the superinfections have become.
“How can you address an epidemic if you don’t know the magnitude of it?”
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