Infections caused by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae have a mortality rate of more than 40 percent, and the number of infections worldwide has been on the rise in recent years.
For example, the University of Virginia Health System saw an increase in CRE transmission in 2010, Kyle Enfield, MD, the medical director of the system's ICU, wrote in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention blog post.
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Dr. Enfield and others first attempted to limit the facility's exposure to CRE and another nosocomial pathogen, extensively drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, but those attempts, based on standard infection control practices, failed, Dr. Enfield wrote.
So, the organization used a bundled set of interventions to assess the prevalence of CRE and XDR-AB colonization in the ICU. The bundled approach brought the CRE incidence down to 0.1 percent of patient days and eliminated drug-resistant A. baumannii completely.
Those measures are now recommended practice in the CDC's 2012 Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae Toolkit.
The experience was documented in a study recently published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, which concluded that the health system's experience shows the effectiveness of the CDC toolkit.
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