Day: 3 March 2015
Outbreaks a matter of ‘when’ not ‘if’: the Hep A crisis & tools to minimise risk, by Richard Bennett
Australia’s food safety and quality assurance standards are widely recognised as being world-leading. We are fortunate that not many serious outbreaks have occurred in Australia, however as the frozen berries hepatitis crisis that has been unfolding over the last two weeks has shown, outbreaks of this nature…
Read Article →Day: 3 March 2015
AU: Onions imported from US suspected of bringing deadly strain of superbug to Australia
Jane Hansen / The Daily Telgraph writes: The highly virulent strain of Clostridium difficile (C-diff), a spore-forming bacterium which causes severe diarrhoea and is resistant to many antibiotics, swept through Europe and the US before arriving in Australia in 2009.
Thomas Riley, a professor of microbiology at the University of Western Australia, said Australian hospitals experienced a dramatic increase in the C-diff strain known as 244 towards the end of 2011.
The bug, which is now the number one cause of hospital-related diarrhoea, poses the biggest risk in hospital settings where high antibiotic use allows it to flourish in compromised patients.
Currently 150 plus patients a month are infected in NSW hospitals.
Click here to read the full story from News Corp.