TORONTO - It's time for a Canada-wide strategy to deal with ailments ranging from the common cold and flu to deadly hospital-acquired infections and the possibility of a pandemic, say groups that have declared Thursday to be National Infectious Diseases Day.
Five organizations representing infectious disease experts and their private sector partners have banded together to release a 12-page document that calls for a strategy to control infections within hospitals and out in the community.
Their call for action is important, they say, because infections acquired in hospitals alone kill 8,000 to 12,000 Canadians a year.
They plan to spend the day in Ottawa pleading their case to MPs and senators.
"Why do we need a strategy in infectious disease? It's because infectious disease is creating an extremely important burden on our Canadian health care, as it is in other industrialized countries,'' said Dr. Michel Laverdiere, president of the Association of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Disease Canada, one of the groups involved.
Managing one patient with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, costs about $17,000 to $35,000, the report states.
"The reality is that you are admitted to hospital for an elective surgery, for instance, just to correct a problem, and by the time you're in the hospital, you pick up another infection, and this will extend your stay,'' Laverdiere explained in an interview from Montreal.
"That creates some burden on the health care (system).''
In Canada, it's estimated that 250,000 people, or one out of nine patients, admitted to hospital each year pick up infections while being treated for something else, the report said.
Tuesday's speech from the throne talked about increasing access to health care for Canadians, Laverdiere noted. But it's getting the upper hand on infectious diseases that will have an impact on freeing up hospital beds and speeding up access, he said.
Besides his organization, the non-profit groups involved in the initiative are the Canadian Foundation for Infectious Diseases, Community and Hospital Infection Control Association-Canada, Canadian Association for Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, and the International Centre for Infectious Diseases.
"The Canada-wide strategy will help to determine, first of all, what are the areas in which we should put more energy,'' he said.
The goal is to prevent disease and relieve some of the burden on hospitals.
Reinforcing the importance of flu vaccination and other inoculations is an important element, he said. So is changing the mindset of employers who might pressure someone with a cold to come to work, where entire offices of people could become infected.
"Change this mentality and say it's probably better off he or she stay home and then protect the rest of my workforce,'' he said.
Infections acquired in the workplace cost Canadians an estimated $15 billion annually, the report states.
In addition, the partners recommend a boost _ more and better equipment _ for laboratories where disease detection work is done.
"They are the sentinel of infectious disease,'' Laverdiere said. "These labs will be the first ones . . . if a highly resistant microbe ventures in our country, you will pick it up (detect it) there first.''
He also said more work is needed to not only develop alternatives to antibiotics, but also to develop new antibiotics as diseases become resistant to current drugs.
