Hospital infections, 8/10%: in intensive care up to 15%

Deaths as a result of infections with multiresistant microorganisms, such as carbapenemics-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, can reach 50% of cases, especially during septicemia and pneumonia, explains Prof. Menichetti

“8-10 % of patients in the hospital encounter infections contracted during hospitalization, and very often these are pneumonias – says the director of the Infectious Diseases Unit of the Pisa Hospital Prof. Francesco Menichetti – In the intensive care unit, this incidence can be as high as 15 percent of inpatients. The germs that cause these infections are now multiresistant and sometimes pan-resistant to antibiotics, and innovative treatment options are in short supply. Lethality of Klebsiella pneumoniae MDR septicemias can reach 50% of; in patients who have severe sepsis or septic shock it is up to 80%. In the ICU up to 20 percent of patients on prolonged mechanical ventilation are at risk of developing pneumonia.

These are important that require precise containment actions”.

THE CONGRESS – This is discussed at the 2nd Central Italy Pneumology Workshop, which concludes today, At the St. John Addolorata Hospital in Rome, headed by Prof. Stefano Carlone. The Conference, through various readings and reports, will address the issues related to the vast majority of respiratory diseases, which are increasingly prevalent today in relation to tobacco habit and air pollution’air pollution.

Most of them have a chronic nature and owe their high prevalence also to the general aging of the population, which frequently conditions the association with numerous comorbidities, so that especially in the most developed countries a very high health and socio-economic commitment is realized.

“I strongly wanted this Conference for three substantial reasons – explains the Prof. Stefano Carlone – The former: this appointment represents the regional institutional task that falls annually to the Lazio section of the SIP Study Center. The second is represented by the fact that this conference is one of the first events since the advent of the merger of AIMAR and SIMER into the newly formed SIP.

The third is that I would like to thank, having come to the end of my 40-year institutional career, all my colleagues, collaborators and friends, confident that all that we have done will grow, even more, in the coming years, and I will be an active and complacent spectator, continuing with a speculative contribution to issues of general interest”.

MULTIDRUG-RESISTANT GERMS: THE SITUATION IN ITALY – For at least twenty years the pharmaceutical industry has stopped allocating resources to research on new antibiotics, which cost so much in terms of development and yield little from an economic point of view, because they are short cycles with modest costs compared to other types of drugs. The crisis is particularly serious because antimicrobial resistance has progressed due to the’reckless use of antibiotics, and we find ourselves without weapons against resistant microbes.

FOUR POINTS TO GET OUT OF THE “CRISIS” – “We need, first of all, an overall strategy– Prof adds. Menichetti – that it is political and technical, involving the’hospital and community physicians, to be able to reconsider antibiotics valuable drugs not to be wasted and to be used properly, so as to reduce selective pressure. The second move is to limit the spread of resistant germs in the hospital, reinforcing infection control, thus blocking the spread of infection.

Finally, we must return to allocating economic resources and betting on independent research again. This is the only way to meet the challenge of antimicrobial resistance”.

INTERDISCIPLINARITY’ COOPERATION BETWEEN INFECTIVOLOGISTS, PULMONOLOGISTS AND CARDIOLOGISTS– “In recent years – states the President of the Congress, the Prof. Stephen Carlone – we have witnessed a sharp increase in serious lung infections, which are particularly difficult to eradicate because they are sustained by germs with resistance to almost all antibiotics. The fear, as recently emerged from the’isolation of strains of GRAM-negative bacteria resistant to all types of antibiotics, is that of a wider spread or even an outright explosion of this issue, even outside of intensive care units, where to date it has sometimes been shown to be. for this reason it is absolutely necessary for physicians to make appropriate and strictly necessary use of antibiotic therapy, also because in the short term only a limited number of new molecules with antibacterial activity&#8221 are expected to be introduced;.