HOSPITALS ARE considered to be places where the sick are healed. But last year's Sars outbreak showed that they can also infect carers with disease. By the end of the Sars crisis, half of the 1,755 people infected with the disease had contracted the virus in a health-care setting, hammering home the dangers of germs spreading within wards.
But Sars is just the latest hospital-spread bug. For decades, other hospital-acquired infections have been slowly gaining a foothold in Hong Kong's health-care institutions.
The most worrying group of hospital-acquired infections are drug-resistant superbugs, which have emerged because of community-wide misuse of antibiotics and lax infection controls in hospitals. The most prevalent of these is methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). MRSA is endemic in Hong Kong hospitals, as it is in hospitals in many other parts of the world.
A stay in a Hong Kong public intensive care unit carries a one-in-10 chance of being colonised by the virus. Of all the staph infections detected in hospital patients, 50 per cent are MRSA, up from between a quarter and a third 10 years ago.
'MRSA-related infections mean people have to stay in hospital longer, treatment entails less effective drugs with more severe side-effects, and some patients will die,' says Dr Ho Pak-Leung, associate professor in the microbiology department in the University of Hong Kong's faculty of medicine.
Once MRSA becomes endemic in a hospital, it's hard to eradicate. Some countries such as the Netherlands successfully adopted a 'search and destroy' approach to slash the rates of MRSA in hospitals. Staff and patients were screened and infected patients were isolated and treated. In most countries, it's too late for that.