By Natasha Wallace
PUBLIC reporting of golden staph bloodstream infections should be mandatory - with all hospitals identified - after a study showed it killed 20 per cent of patients within a month, experts say.
This is almost double the previously reported rate of 11 per cent. The study, published in The Medical Journal of Australia today, involved six Sydney hospitals, including Westmead, Royal North Shore and Liverpool.
Forty per cent of cases of Staphylococcus aureus bacteraemia are hospital-acquired, and most are preventable. Yet NSW Health has dragged its heels since promising last November to publish hospital infection rates.
Professor John Turnidge, the lead author of the study, said the infection rate would probably halve if hospitals were forced to acknowledge the growing problem because it would lead to better hand-washing methods and improved care of intravenous catheters.
Professor Turnidge, director of microbiology and infectious diseases at SA Pathology, said health departments had consistently put the problem in the too-hard basket.
''I think the health-care system has said we can't conjure up a solution [to reducing infection rates]. Therefore the standard response is to turn their backs on it,'' Professor Turnidge said.
''You don't just count them. Count the bodies. This is a really serious infection.''
There are about 6000 golden staph infections in Australia each year, putting the death toll at about 1200, he said. The study analysed data from 1994 cases of infection between June 2007 and May last year from 27 sites, three of them in New Zealand.
The study was the first of its kind to measure the impact on patients for longer than a week, and found that 20.6 per cent died within 30 days.
A previous study put the mortality rate at 11.2 per cent after discharge or seven days, whichever came sooner.
NSW Health reported there were 1340 health care-associated golden staph infections last year, but it does not publish data on individual hospitals or trends.
A spokesman said a federal-state working group was examining how to do this.
Professor Peter Collignon, director of infectious diseases at Canberra Hospital, said most of the infections were preventable.
"We need to ensure that in each hospital each case is looked at to try and determine why it occurred,'' Professor Collignon said. ''Then health professionals need to intervene at their own local level to ensure policies are implemented or changed to reduce infection rates.''