Superbug fears hit British playgrounds

Panton and Valentine associated the toxin with soft tissue infections in 1932 so the NHS has had time to think of something to do about it

A superbug to which children are particularly vulnerable is spreading in Britain and specialists say the government is failing to take action to stop it. A Sunday Times investigation has found at least 10 youngsters aged between six and 13 have been left fighting for their lives after contracting the infection. Doctors are concerned because they appear to have caught the bug in playgrounds and parks.

The children were all hit by Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL), a toxin that combines with MRSA, the bacteria that cause thousands of infections, sometimes lethal, in hospitals. Mark Enright, professor of molecular epidemiology at Imperial College London, said: “This infection can kill healthy children in one to two days, but the authorities are continuing to treat MRSA as purely a hospital problem and trying to assuage public opinion.”

Other specialists accuse the government of ignoring warnings about the seriousness of PVL-MRSA, failing to mount adequate infection surveillance and blocking the use of a treatment to tackle it. Professor Richard Wise, a leading microbiologist, says that he warned a government health minister three years ago of the threat, but little has been done.

The phenomenon of PVL-MRSA was identified in America several years ago. British doctors have now reported cases from the south coast to the Midlands. They include a six-year-old girl left brain-damaged after she fell off her scooter and contracted the infection in her shin bone, from where it spread throughout her body, and a nine-year-old boy who was crippled after a graze playing football.

The mother of a 10-year-old boy in London who caught the bug said: “One day he was playing happily and the next day he couldn’t see, speak or move. The doctors didn’t know what was happening. It was terrifying.” Official figures show that the number of recorded PVL infections rose from 224 in 2005 to 496 in 2006.

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Australia: Fewer beds at major NSW hospital than 13 years ago

Despite a significant rise in the population

THERE are 186 fewer beds at Sydney's troubled Royal North Shore Hospital than there were 13 years ago when the state Labor Government came to power, Health Department figures reveal. In March 1995, 776 beds were available to patients, but on the latest available figures the hospital has just 590 beds. The figures, obtained by the NSW Opposition under freedom of information, measured bed decline from 1993 to September last year. Opposition health spokesman Jillian Skinner said the figure was alarming when the remaining 590 beds included cots, bassinets, critical-care beds, mental-health beds, maternity beds, and "transition beds" in patients' homes.

Under the $702 million hospital redevelopment announced by Health Minister Reba Meagher in November last year, the hospital will end up with 626 beds. In 2003, when Premier Morris Iemma was health minister, the number of beds reached its lowest point at 547. "Every RNSH doctor who gave evidence at the parliamentary inquiry into the hospital last year spoke of the desperate shortage of acute-care beds," Ms Skinner said. "The NSW Labor Government has stripped more than 180 beds from RNSH since it came to power 13 years ago," Ms Skinner said. "It also expanded the definition of a bed so even those in a patient's own home are counted as hospital beds. The new hospital will be seriously short of beds."

Ms Meagher yesterday said there was less need for large numbers of beds as patients now stayed in hospital for shorter periods. "The 23-hour unit at Royal North Shore Hospital today performs a number of day-only procedures that 10 years ago would have resulted in a five-day stay in hospital," she said. "For example, hernia and varicose-vein procedures, which resulted in a three- to seven-day stay in hospital 10 years ago, are now performed mostly as day only procedures."

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