One of the allegations in The Welfare State We're In is that the published figures for deaths resulting from MRSA in Britain are seriously understated.

This suggestion was supported this weekend by Dr Mark Enright, a microbiologist at Imperial College, London. He was quoted in the Sunday Telegraph saying,

"I would expect that the death figures substantially under-report the true situation. In a lot of cases, MRSA doesn't make it on to the death certificate when it should. Instead you see organ failure, pneumonia, or sepsis.

"Often it is hard to say exactly how much of a contribution MRSA caused to the death, but there is a tendency not to include it."

And further on,

He said that neither the number of deaths officially linked to MRSA nor the rate of bloodstream infections provided a full picture.

"I would say bloodstream infections account for 10 per cent of the infections in total," he said. "If people tested every infection, the rate would be far, far higher."

The Sunday Telegraph also offered a particular example of someone who was not classified as dying from MRSA yet who was evidently suffering from it very seriously:

John Howard Crews, 50, died in hospital in December 2003, three months after suffering a heart attack. His death certificate recorded the cause of death as pneumonia and cardiac failure. However, his stepson Derek Butler, who witnessed the last six hours of his stepfather's life in which he was "coiled up in a foetal position with his legs turned blue", was convinced an infection was to blame. When he and his mother asked questions of Blackpool Victoria Hospital, it emerged that Mr Howard Crews's lungs were "profusely infected with MRSA" and that the infection had been identified a week before his death.

Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, was also quoted as saying,

"We hear time and time again of cases where there is MRSA but the death certificate says pneumonia, or a chest infection, and it is only when relatives start asking questions that they find out that MRSA was present."

The full article is here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in NHS

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