Dr. Steve Stites, chief medical officer, The University of Kansas Health System
- A bug is the general term for any organism that can cause an infection in humans -- from bacteria, viruses, and COVID, to parasites, fungi, and others.
- Superbugs are strains that are resistant to most all the antibiotics and other medications commonly used to treat infections that they cause. A few example of superbugs include resistant bacteria that can cause pneumonia and some forms of staph aureus.
- Antibiotics are a type of medicine that kill or stop the growth of bacteria. They often inhibit during the reproductive phase of a bacteria or they do something that kills the bacteria in some other way.
- Antibiotic resistance is a public health crisis. There has to be a partnership here within industry, academic, and government to help focus and try and help solve this problem.
U.S. Senator Roger Marshall
- Senator Marshall is a doctor and has vast experience in dealing with patients who have had antibiotic resistance.
- His office has made it a priority to help supplement the research in the area of drug-resistant antibiotics. So the priority is to help supplement the research, education, prevention, detection and treatment.
- He is trying to push the private sector and BARDA to work together to get these drugs through the process -- the research, the development, and then working with someone like The University of Kansas Health System to help implement them and conduct those follow up studies that need to be completed.
- Universities plays such a pivotal role in bringing new products to market because pharmaceutical manufacturers and small tech innovators heavily rely on teaching academic hospitals such as KU to run their clinical trials.
- Credit goes to veterinarians who have decreased the number of antibiotics used in agriculture. Human care doctors also need to look at how antibiotics are prescribed for patients so they are not overused.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, director of infection & prevention control, The University of Kansas Health System
- We need new antibiotic drugs to be developed. We have the technology now to develop, research, and produce more safe and effective drugs, but the pipeline for that overall is extremely slow.
- We want to make sure the benefit of the drug is better than the risk of that and we know that some of these older antibiotics can be linked to toxicity for patients in some cases.
- The first step is to prevent infections overall. We have those systems and processes in place to help reduce that risk of infection or spread.
- If a patient has an infection, we work to prevent bacteria getting transferred to an employee or another patient as well. There are many layers of treatment and infection prevention of these superbugs that we do in the hospital every day and it's done on the floor every day.
- Everyone from our environmental services team who clean the rooms to help reduce the colonization and contamination to the nurses on the floor, everyone makes infection prevention a priority.
Morning Rounds – Updates on Current News
Dr. Jennifer Hartwell, chief of emergency general surgery, The University of Kansas Health System
- Late Show host Stephen Colbert had to cancel a few shows after his appendix ruptured six weeks after he had COVID.
- Whether his appendix bursting was related to COVID is hard to connect, because the data to support that is not there.
- Patients who have appendicitis or problems with a gallbladder that would warrant a trip to the emergency department usually have things like fever, nausea, vomiting, and pain that doesn't subside and the pain that gets worse. Some people describe it as the most severe pain they've had.
- Pain that's in the lower abdomen on the right side is pretty typical for appendicitis. Pain kind of up in the upper right side is typical for the gallbladder. I would advise my family members if they have a fever, pain, nausea, vomiting that just isn't abating to come to the emergency department get checked out.
Friday, December 1 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. As we head into winter, learn more about how to people can deal with seasonal affective disorder.
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