Thank you, Mr. Speaker.Let me start off today by sharing some very shocking numbers. Every year, over 220,000 Canadians develop infections during their hospital stay, and on average, these infections kill 22 patients every single day. To put this number into perspective, this is about the same number of Canadians who will die from breast cancer and leukemia combined.
This is the new reality facing our hospitals in the 21st century and it has now become a very massive
burden on our health care system. This is a fight we cannot afford to lose.
Right now the superbugs that pose the biggest challenges in our hospitals are Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA; Clostridium Difficile, or called C. Difficile; Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, or VRE; and the latest threat is Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE. That’s a mouthful.
Collectively, right now one in every 12 patients in a Canadian hospital is infected by one of these superbugs and the NWT is not immune to these statistics. Unfortunately, we just don’t track all of them.
Just last week the Minister of Health and Social Services tabled the NWT Department of Health and Social Services Annual Report of 2012-2013, and within this report, on page 34, it states the incidence of Methicillin-resistant Staph A, and that’s the only superbug that it lists. This superbug has increased from a baseline of 28 cases per 10,000 patients to 46.6 cases in 2012-13. So what does that mean? It means that in almost a year it has doubled. In fact, if you look back to 2006 at three
cases of MRSA for 10,000 patients, we are nearly at a 15 times multiplier in seven years.
What is further alarming with the relevance of these increasing cases of MRSA is that it is mostly affecting our seniors and elders in our population, and because our population is aging, we should be very careful with that.
In the end, I am greatly concerned that with an alarming statistic of one of every 12 patients infected with a superbug, which is an epidemic in my books, is our current health care system doing enough with just an awareness campaign as it states in this report? Or should we be following mainstream health care with better collection, analysis, monitoring and reporting to the public…
Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.
---Unanimous consent granted
