Researchers have identified three key factors that increase the risk for patients to pass on carbapenemase-producing carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriacecae to another patient, helping explain why some contacts get the bacteria but others do not.
"The spread of CP-CRE is a major public health concern because it is extremely drug resistant; however, the research on these pathogens is very limited, and so is our knowledge of their transmission," said Vered Schechner, MD, lead author of the study published in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology. "Identifying high-risk groups helps us to avoid excessive screening that can be risky and expensive, and to determine who should be screened and who might be a candidate for pre-emptive isolation or antibiotics."
Dr. Schechner and the team discovered that 96 percent of patient-to-patient transmission of CP-CRE had at least one of the following three risk factors:
- Contact for more than three days with an infected person
- Mechanical ventilation
- Infection with another multidrug-resistant bacteria
They also discovered patients who take cephalosporins were less likely to acquire CP-CRE than patients who took other types of antibiotics.