Patients and hospital staff now need to focus on hand hygiene.

– No patient has had serious infections so far, but to prevent this from happening we are implementing several measures to stop the spread of infection, says infection control specialist Astri Lervik Larsen in a press release.

Linezolid-resistant enterococci (ERL) are bacteria that belong to our normal intestinal flora. What sets it apart from other gut bacteria is not that it’s more dangerous, but that it’s more resistant to antibiotics and more demanding to treat.

These bacteria thrive in hospitals where patients receive a lot of antibiotics.

– We have an increasing incidence of LRE in Kalnes, and patients have been infected while hospitalized with us. We have a treatment for the bacteria, but it’s not a bacteria we want in a hospital setting, explains Lervik Larsen.

More difficult to treat

People who carry the bacteria do not necessarily get sick. But in the case of, for example, a urinary tract infection which is often caused by intestinal bacteria, the infection can become more difficult to treat because the bacteria are resistant to antibiotics.

– To treat infections caused by this bacterium, broad-spectrum antibiotics must be used. These are antibiotics that we initially want to use as little as possible, because high consumption of such antibiotics can lead to more antibiotic resistance.

Important hand hygiene

– Dirty hands spread infection. For healthy people, it’s basically a harmless bacteria, but since there are a lot of vulnerable patients in a hospital, it’s a bacteria we want to get rid of as soon as possible, says the supervisor of the infection control later in the release.

Since it is a bacterium that can survive for a long time in the environment, the hospital now reinforces the cleanliness of the hospitalization areas.