Letters to the Editor
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‘Scrub Them Out’
Roger Bates piece, “Scrub Them Out,” about lax control of resistant infections in hospitals notes that public agencies are now “making gestures toward reform” and that New York State has required the institution of a statewide hospital reporting system by 2009 [Oped, “Scrub Them Out,” November 6, 2007].
In fact, some 10 years ago, the New York State Department of Health funded a pilot project to detect superbugs in hospitals. The New York Antimicrobial Resistance Project, or NYARP, was an extraordinary collaboration among six major New York City hospitals to develop an early-detection and infection-tracking system and to share the resulting information.
The system provided infection control experts at the hospitals, data about new bugs that were becoming resistant to drugs and their strains, the antibiotics to which they were resistant, and the demographics about infected patients.
NYARP respected all patient privacy laws and tightly restricted access to internal hospital information, but it gave infection control experts vital information about new outbreaks in real time so they could develop appropriate intervention/ prevention measures.
NYARP standardized the nomenclature for the antibiotics and the bugs, which vary from hospital to hospital, and was thus was able to provide general, aggregate information about citywide trends and patterns in drug resistance. This enabled the six hospitals to intervene quickly and take appropriate prevention measures.
Unfortunately, this important collaboration was ahead of the news cycle. Funding ran out in 2004 and NYARP was unable to expand to other New York hospitals or even continue.
But the sophisticated early-detection and reporting system NYARP crafted still exists. Now is the time to resuscitate it.
WILLA APPEL
Founder
NYARP project
Executive Vice President
The New York Structural Biology Center
New York, N.Y.
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