Top Health Ministry and hospital officials are charging the ministry with failure to demonstrate adequate public or professional leadership in its treatment of the outbreak of the antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria that was recently discovered in Israeli hospitals.

The ministry's conduct "was characterized by helplessness" and constitutes a "public failure of the first degree," a senior Health Ministry official told Haaretz yesterday.

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"The concern arises that the [ministry] administration forfeited public health, completely failed, and is now busy only with the attempt to minimize the affair," the official said.

"No less severe than the affair itself is the fact that it appears that right now there is no process under way in the ministry for learning from its mistakes. The matter should deeply worry the public in Israel."

The Health Ministry provided hospitals with binding instructions yesterday that are meant to curb disease caused by the virulent Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria strain, which is estimated to have infected hundreds of hospital patients in 2006 and contributed to the deaths of several dozen of them.

Meteoric rise

However, senior doctors who specialize in prevention of the spread of infectious diseases warned Health Ministry director general Prof. Avi Yisraeli and deputy director Dr. Boaz Lev about two weeks ago that there had been a "meteoric rise" in the outbreak of the antibiotic-resistant strain.

In addition, some two years ago, top doctors specializing in infection prevention asked the ministry to establish a national authority for the prevention of infection in hospitals, which would have collected data and monitor infection rates.

Had such an organization been established, veteran doctors said, then the recent outbreak of the virulent Klebsiella would have been caught earlier and would not have spread so readily.