Two superbugs have shown up in Barbados in the past and infectious disease specialist Dr Corey Forde says the country cannot lapse when it comes to dealing with treatment-resistant organisms.
Forde, head of the Infection Prevention and Control Department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, however stressed there was no need to panic over the matter.
“Pan drug resistant organisms means the antibiotics we have available either won’t work well or we have nothing to treat them. Those [organisms] have arrived on the world scene and in Barbados and the Caribbean we are at a similar state where we already have recorded pan drug resistant organisms where we have limited amount of drugs to use to treat them.
“We have [recorded] high-level [treatment] resistant [strains] of Klebsiella and E Coli (Escherichia Coli), where there were two or three ‘bugs’,” said Forde, who was speaking yesterday after the opening ceremony of the two-day Caribbean Infection Control/Antimicrobial Stewardship Conference at the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO)/World Health Organisation (WHO) office in Dayrells Road, St Michael. (CA)
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