Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, May 18, 1995                   TAG: 9505180042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

MUCH CLOSER THAN AFRICA, A HEALTH RISK IS GROWING

While an exotic virus in Africa grabs headlines, common bacteria turned vicious by antibiotic resistance pose a greater threat to Americans' health, experts say.

There are now bacterial infections, many of them common in hospitals, that cannot be treated by any of the current antibiotics, and the problem is apt to get worse, Dr. Mitchell Cohen of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

``Microbes that were once easily controlled now no longer respond to antibiotic drugs,'' said Cohen.

Such bacteria are far more likely to cause illness in the United States than is the Ebola virus that now rages in Zaire, a group of experts said at a news conference. They said that drug-resistant strains of bacteria already have made some infections untreatable in the United States, and that this problem will get worse as more and more germs genetically change.

The bacteria have become resistant to drugs like penicillin, erythromycin, vancomycin and tetracycline that once were the ``magic bullets'' of medicine's war on infection, said Cohen.

Now, said Cohen, there are many bacteria in hospitals, nursing homes and among the general public that are not killed by the drugs. These include strains that infect surgical wounds, the urinary tract and the respiratory tract and which cause pneumonia, the sixth-leading killer of elderly Americans.

``The problem can become very, very serious,'' he said. ``We already have some untreatable infections and some bacteria strains are just one antibiotic away from being untreatable.''

Dr. Donald Goldman of Harvard University said one reason that bacteria have developed resistance to drugs in the United States is that the germs have been overexposed to antibiotics.

Overusing drugs can cause resistant bacteria, which at first may be rare, to survive and thrive while the drugs kill off the nonresistant bacteria. Eventually, the dominant strains are super bugs that are not hurt by the drugs.

``Some physicians prescribe antibiotics excessively and inappropriately,'' said Goldman. This often is done at the insistence of patients or the parents of sick children. Some doctors prescribe the drugs to be seen as doing something, even though the patients may be suffering from viral infections that cannot be affected by the antibiotics, he said.

Many hospitals are overlooking one of the simplest ways of preventing infection: washing hands.

Goldman said studies have shown that many hospital workers are careless about hand washing and the use of barrier protection, and they may spread infection as they go from patient to patient.

``Barrier techniques are more strictly enforced in the computer chip than in some of our hospitals,'' he said.

Another problem, said Goldman, is a slowness in identifying the bacteria in a specific infection. While waiting for answers from the laboratory, he said, doctors often give a broad-sprectrum antibiotic in a ``shotgun approach'' to infection. This tends to create more drug-resistant bacterial strains.