Enterobacteriaceae bloodstream infections are now more common than infections caused by Staphylococcus aureus, according to a Medscape report.
Researchers presented the data at the 24th European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. They analyzed more than 606,000 acute-care admissions at 10 European hospitals lasting more than two days.
They found 1048 bloodstream infections caused by S. aureus, 15.5 percent of which were resistant to methicillin. More than double that number of bloodstream infections were caused by Enterobacteriaceae. Of the 2,460 documented Enterobacteriaceae bloodstream infections, 17 percent were resistant to third-generation cephalosporins
These results also suggest S. aureus are becoming less resistant to methicillin while Enterobacteriaceae are becoming more resistant to cephalosporins.
Although Enterobacteriaceae bloodstream infections are now more common than S. aureus infections, patients with S. aureus infection experience longer hospital stays and higher mortality rates. However, researchers observed differences in these figures, depending on a strain's set of drug resistances.
The BSI mortality rate was 22.1 percent for MRSA and 16.8 percent for methicillin-susceptible strains of S. aureus, compared to 16.1 percent for cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae infections and 10.1 percent for susceptible Enterobacteriaceae strains.
Additionally, S. aureus hospital stays for both resistant (13.33 days) and susceptible strains (11.54 days) were longer than both resistant Enterobacteriaceae infections (9.28 days) and susceptible strains (5.87 days).
Researchers suggest further studies are needed to confirm their findings, according to the report.
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