Despite warnings from senior physicians received as early as two weeks ago, the Health Ministry has not yet issued special directions or instructions to hospitals and clinical facilities aimed at minimizing the risk of patients' contracting bacteria strains resistant to all known antibiotics.

In addition, Haaretz has learned that the ministry has not instructed hospitals to report on patients who have been infected with the bacteria, despite the physicians' demand that the problem be dealt with immediately. The doctors warned that since the beginning of 2006, there had been a "meteoric rise" in patients infected by Klebsiella pneumoniae, which has recently infected hundreds of patients and caused the death of dozens.

Such instructions would have included directions to quarantine all known patients and treat them in confined premises through a uniform procedure, the assignment of special nursing teams to infected patients and the implementation of a procedure for their transportation from one facility to the other.

	Advertisement

To date, the Health Ministry has not conducted a national survey of the problem, and has yet to compile a database of all known cases. Furthermore, after ministry director general Prof. Avi Israeli was made aware of the crisis, he did not report on it to the senior staff of the ministry. Israel's largest health-maintenance organization, Clalit, which is responsible for one-third of the country's hospital beds, was also not informed of the situation.

Haaretz has learned as well that the only actions carried out following the meeting of Health Ministry administrators two weeks ago with the senior physicians, were the appointment of a special steering committee responsible for dealing with the crisis, and the summoning of all hospital directors to a meeting last Thursday.

That meeting was originally scheduled to take place some three weeks after the meeting with the physicians, and was moved up only after the outbreak was publicized in the media. It resulted in a the sending of a position paper sent to all hospitals, whose recommendations, unlike directions issued by the health ministry, were not legally binding.

The Health Ministry responded to the findings by stating that the steering committee, headed by Prof. Yehuda Carmeli, head of epidemiology and preventive medicine at Tel Aviv's Ichilov Medical Center, has issued its recommendations regarding the outbreak Thursday to all hospitals.

Prof. Carmeli has estimated that each year, approximately 4,000-5,000 patients die in hospitals after contracting bacterial infections. In his estimation, 800-1,000 of them could be saved if the Health Ministry and the hospitals would take proper steps to adhere to all hygienic norms.