Nursing & Healthcare News
Antibiotic Resistance
2.9 million infections a year, but hospital efforts are helping
A new CDC report estimates that antibiotic-resistant infections now kill almost 36,000 people a year in the U.S., but hospitals have made some important progress in infection control.
Strong Improvement
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, the CDC published “Antibiotic Resistance Threats in the United States, 2019,” an updated version of a report previously issued back in 2013.
The latest report offers some sobering estimates: Antibiotic-resistant (AR) bacteria and fungi now cause at least 2,868,700 infections and 35,900 deaths each year in the U.S.
However, the good news is that hospital-associated AR infections have fallen 28 percent since 2012, meaning that hospital efforts to combat these infections are helping. Hospital deaths due to Clostridioides difficile and MRSA infections — which together cause more deaths than all other drug-resistant infections combined — have also declined by almost 30 percent.
