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BUGS - Are you Ready?? Are you prepared to protect yourself and your loved ones in the future or are you relying on the government to tell you the truth?! Feeding antibiotics to livestock and prescribing drugs for our most minor ailments has brought humanity to the most serious health crisis in history. Powerful viruses have mutated to become immune to all known drugs, and superbugs are now racing through hospitals in the United States and Canada at an alarming rate. Already out of control in Ontario they face only one minor evolutionary step before becoming an unstoppable, worldwide killer of millions. Some say hundreds of millions. Canadian hospitals are afraid to admit publicly that there is a problem according to an infections disease consultant at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. Yet, the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta has a so called medical SWAT team standing by waiting for the day most experts fear. The epidemic has already started, but it's about to turn catastrophic - and that's going to happen suddenly. Possibly right here in Canada. At a recent meeting in Moncton, The Community and Hospital Infection Control Association predicted that 200,000 Canadians will catch infections in healthcare facilities over the next year and that at least 9,000 will die as a result. Increasingly, infections picked up in hospitals are traced in antibiotic resistant superbugs. In North America there were over 550,000 cases of drug-resistant staph infections in the last year alone. Canadian officials used to take a somewhat smug attitude towards dead drug-resistant viruses, assuming it was a USA problem and that Canadian facilities were better equipped to deal with an outbreak. That attitude has now proven deadly. This is the biggest, single public health problem facing Canada this century, stresses microbiologist Jim Hutchinson of St. John's, Newfoundland. We could be watching people die of things we used to treat with a pill, he said. Superbugs can cause deadly pneumonia, infected incisions, meningitis, and skin, heart, bone or blood infections. Once infected patients must be isolated, costing about $15,000 to $20,000 a patient to treat, and isolation has limited effectiveness. These bacteria are almost impossible to kill even
with the strongest disinfectants, making it difficult to sterilize a hospital
room or even a hospital following an infection. |