SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Deceased Palestinian prisoner Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh had been stricken with cancer for 'years' and was treated with improper medication, official doctors from the Palestinian Authority and Jordan have found.

Israeli doctors did not stop Abu Hamdiyeh's cancer from spreading, although he had been complaining of bodily pains since 2003, Palestinian Prisoner Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqe said Thursday as he announced the results of an autopsy.

The 64 year old former Fatah member succumbed to oesophageal cancer on Tuesday. More than 6,000 Palestinians, reported to include all factions, poured into the streets of Hebron for his funeral.

Prison authorities disclosed his diagnosis in February, and said they tried to secure his release shortly after.

A statement from the Israeli Prison Service after his death said: "The prisoner was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in February and was under the medical supervision of experts at the hospital. About a week ago, after being diagnosed as terminal, the IPS appealed to the release committee to secure his early release, a process which had been started but not yet concluded."

Lawyers and relatives report that prison doctors ran biopsy tests on him in 2012 but refused to inform him of his disease.

“Instead of providing him with the correct treatment, the doctors gave him flu shots that caused severe pain in his chest, which he could hardly sleep after,” said Abu Hamdiyeh's lawyer al-Alami to Electronic Intifada

His sister Itidal told the online magazine she visited him in January, one month before his official diagnosis, and found that his voice was completely gone.

Angered by Abu Hamdiyeh’s death, the entire Palestinian prisoner population refused their morning meal Wednesday, according to a statement by the IPS, and the Palestinian Authority announced a three-day general strike across the West Bank.

Abu Hamdiyeh is the second Palestinian to die in Israeli custody this year. Arafat Jaradat, 30, died after an interrogation session in February. Palestinian officials said he had been tortured, an allegation Israel denied.

Two Palestinian youths shot dead

Israeli troops shot dead two Palestinian youths in Tulkarem, officials said Thursday, heightening tension ahead of Abu Hamdiyeh's funeral.

Palestinian security officials said Amer Nassar, 17, was killed by shots to the head. According to AFP, the body of his 18-year-old cousin, Naji Balbisi, was discovered at the site at dawn on Thursday with wounds to the chest.

However, Palestine’s Ma’an News Agency reports that Israeli forces detained Balbisi’s for several hours, and then at 4 a.m., and handed the body to a Red Crescent ambulance.

Both teenagers were to be buried after midday prayers.

The Israeli army said troops opened fire at rioters who hurled petrol bombs at a military post at Tulkarem late on Wednesday, as violent protests erupted in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority called for a general strike Tuesday after the death of Maysara Abu Hamdiyeh in an Israeli jail.

Following mass protests in the West Bank over the death of Abu Hamdiyeh, Israeli planes had gone into action on Tuesday, targeting what the military described as "two extensive terror sites in the northern Gaza Strip."

Hours after it launched its first air strikes in the Palestinian enclave in four months, the Israeli military said two rockets fired from the Gaza Strip struck the southern town of Sderot on Wednesday morning, causing no casualties.

Fighters in the Gaza Strip early Thursday fired a mortar shell across the border, the army confirmed, adding that there were no casualties or damage.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had issued a stern warning, saying: "If calm is disrupted, we will respond forcefully."-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:al-akhbar

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who became South Africa's first black president, is "responding positively" to treatment for a recurring lung infection, President Jacob Zuma's office has said.

Mandela, 94, was admitted to hospital overnight. Authorities declined to name the hospital where he is receiving treatment but he is widely believed to be either at Mediclinic Heart Hospital or 1 Military Hospital - both in Pretoria.
"He remains under treatment and observation in hospital," the statement said on Thursday, without giving further details. 
Mandela has become increasingly frail in recent years and has been admitted to hospital several times since last year.
He was hospitalised earlier this month, receiving what a presidential spokesman described as a "successful" medical test.

"Doctors are attending to him, ensuring that he has the best possible expert medical treatment and comfort," the statement from Zuma's office said. 
It appealed "for understanding and privacy in order to allow space to the doctors to do their work".

Zuma wished Mandela a speedy recovery, referring to him affectionately by his clan name, "Madiba".

"We appeal to the people of South Africa and the world to pray for our beloved Madiba and his family and to keep them in their thoughts," the presidential statement quoted Zuma as saying.
"We have full confidence in the medical team and know that they will do everything possible to ensure recovery."

Al Jazeera's Haru Mutasa, reporting from Johannesburg, said many South Africans were concerned about Mandela's health.

"There is a lot activity on social media - Facebook and Twitter. Many people wishing him well, hoping that he will soon be discharged," Mutasa said.

"Most South African understand the fact that he is an old man, and that he will go in and out of hospital more often than not. There isn't a sense of panic right now."

Mandela spent a night in a hospital and was released on March 10 following a medical test. At that time, presidential spokesman Mac Maharaj said the former president was "well".

In December, Mandela spent three weeks in a hospital, where he was treated for a lung infection and had a procedure to remove gallstones. 
A year ago, Mandela was admitted to a Johannesburg hospital for what officials initially described as tests but what turned out to be an acute respiratory infection.

He was discharged days later. He also had surgery for an enlarged prostate gland in 1985.

Under South Africa's white-minority apartheid regime, Mandela spent 27 years in prison, where he contracted tuberculosis, before being released in 1990.

He later became the nation's first democratically elected president in 1994 under the banner of the African National Congress, helping to negotiate a relatively peaceful end to apartheid despite fears of much greater bloodshed.

He served one five-year term as president before retiring.www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:AL Jazeera

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The UK’s Queen Elizabeth II has been advised to resign and relinquish power as she gets older and overburdened with a tough schedule to live with, local media reported.

The advice came from former Labour deputy prime minister Lord Prescott, who suggested that “the Queen should think about abdication because she is overburdened at the age of 86”, British media reported.

The former deputy premier added that ‘the monarch was risking her health and deserves a break’.

The high-ranking British official said that the Queen herself might not be sure about her own health after she was recently hospitalized for a stomach bug issue.

Lord Prescott, a member of the Privy Council which advises the Queen, tried to appear affectionate and friendly towards the queen, noting that “the monarch should break with convention and consider enjoying a long and fulfilling retirement”, according to the reports.

“His concern was that the Queen, who is 87 next month, is overburdening herself,” he said.

Lord Prescott also referred to the queen’s ongoing ill health because of which she has been increasingly cancelling her public duties recently, saying that “she had done a remarkable job over her 60 years on the throne”.

“My friend noted the monarch would be delivering her 61st queen’s speech in May, where she’ll announce her future trips abroad, on top of her many other public duties.

“So he asked me, as a privy councillor, to tell her that he didn’t expect her to see out her royal duties as the Queen.

“She deserves a break and he wouldn’t think less of her if she stepped down”, said Lord Prescott.

This is while that the queen herself had said on her 21st birthday that she regarded ruling Britain as a job for life.

But Lord Prescott described the fears over the ‘heavy load’ she continues to carry as head of state.

“She has given wise counsel to 12 prime ministers, from [Winston] Churchill to [David] Cameron, and has made her mark on the country she loves,” he said. Buckingham Palace declined to comment.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: Press TV

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –The US Southern Command (Southcom) has requested $49 million to build a new prison building at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba “for special detainees” as well as carry out other “necessary” renovations, US media reveal.

The proposed facility is an apparent replacement for Camp 7, which was constructed to hold 14 “high-value” detainees – including the self-described 9/11 attack architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed – who had been in CIA custody, but were handed over to the military in 2006.

Follow RT's in-depth day-by-day timeline on Gitmo hunger strike

The proposed prison comes on top of funds previously requested to upgrade the camp’s facilities, including a new dining hall, barracks for prison guards, a hospital, a “legal meeting complex” and a“communications network facility” to store data,  the New York Times reports.
Many of the facilities were in a state of disrepair as they were never intended to be used on a permanent basis, a Southcom spokesman told the Huffington Post.
"Most of the buildings and infrastructure were built for a short-term mission," said Lt. Cmdr. Ron Flanders. "We got down there in 2002, but never in a million years would we still have this in 2013 with no end in sight."
The additional request will balloon the overall cost to $195.7 million, significantly higher than the estimated $150-170 million that Southcom commander General John Kelly gave while providing congressional testimony on Wednesday, NYT reports.
The special detention facility was also not included among the list of proposed constructions released by Southcom on Wednesday.
All of the projects have already been approved by Kelly, though they are pending approval by the Pentagon, which is headed the new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.
With an operational budget of $177 million for 2013, Guantanamo is the United States most expensive prison, with US taxpayers already paying more than $1 million dollars for each of the camp’s 166 detainees per annum.

The proposed upgrades come in the midst of a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees which has now entered its 45th day.

On Wednesday, Kelly told a congressional committee that two dozen Guantanamo prisoners were on

"hunger strike light" following allegations the Koran had been mishandled, claims which the general dismissed as

“nonsense.” “They had great optimism that Guantanamo would be closed. They were devastated apparently ... when the president backed off, at least [that's] their perception, of closing the facility,"John Kelly told the House Armed Services Committee in Washington.

The officially-acknowledged number of Gitmo detainees on hunger strike reached 26 people on Friday, with eight receiving enteral feeds, Guantanamo Bay spokesman Capt. Robert Durand told RT.

Former Guantanamo prison official Ret. Col. Morris Davis told RT that many of the hunger strikers had become disillusioned with Obama’s promise of hope and change.

“But here you have a majority of the men at Guantanamo -- 86 of the 106 who have been cleared for transfer -- who have been in confinement now for more than a decade in some cases. So to them, with the hunger strike, they’re kind of out of sight out of mind and the only way to potentially call attention to it is to do something drastic like a hunger strike. So the numbers - DoD has said the numbers have gone from seven to 14 to 21, to I believe 25 is the last official number. But if you talk to some of the attorneys that have been down there, they say that’s a low-ball figure, that it’s probably three or four times that.” President Barack Obama’s first act as president was to sign an executive order to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that,” Obama told CBS’ Steve Kroft in November 2008.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Your sweet tooth could be deadly: researchers have found that 25,000 people died from drinking sugary beverages in the US in 2010 – and 180,000 have died worldwide. The data presents new evidence on the public health hazard triggered by artificial drinks.

Nearly half of all Americans, 48 percent, last year were drinking at least one glass of soda per day, Gallup reported in July. Among soda-drinkers, the average daily amount is 2.6 glasses. With such a high rate of soda consumption, Americans should be worried about new data that Harvard researchers have discovered about the danger of consuming sugary beverages.

Gitanjali Singh, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston and lead author of the study, has spent five years researching the effect of sugary beverages with her Harvard colleagues. The team found that the artificial drinks were directly responsible for 133,000 deaths from diabetes, 44,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease and 6,000 deaths from cancer in 2010.

With so many Americans drinking themselves to death, the researchers have termed the dangerous habit a ‘public health hazard’. And while the cause of death is usually attributed to a specific disease, the researchers found that the high rate of consumption of sugary drinks directly caused those conditions.

"We know that sugar-sweetened beverages are linked to obesity, and that a large number of deaths are caused by obesity-related diseases. But until now, nobody had really put these pieces together,"Singh said while presenting the results of the study at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in New Orleans.

The researchers made their conclusions based on data that recorded how many sugar-sweetened beverages people drank, divided by age and sex. They then proceeded to determine how the amounts of consumed beverages affected obesity rates, diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers. Finally, the scientists calculated the mortality rates of these conditions and concluded that 180,000 deaths could be attributed to the consumption of unhealthy beverages.

The results of the study come just one week after New York City Judge Milton Tingling blocked Mayor Michael Bloomberg from implementing a city-wide ban on supersized sugary drinks. Bloomberg, angered about the rejection, said that the judge was “totally in error” and that he was “talking about lives versus profits”. The ban would have outlawed artificial beverages served in containers 16 ounces or larger. Critics have argued that Americans determined to drink large quantities of soda could simply order multiple drinks or refill them – and that the restriction would simply turn New York into a “nanny state”.

Whether or not lawmakers should have control over Americans’ consumption is still a matter or debate. But the researchers claim the fact that sugary drinks are unhealthy has been confirmed.

However the American Beverage Association has publicly criticized the Harvard study, claiming that the researchers couldn’t possibly link deaths to sugary drinks.

"It does not show that consuming sugar-sweetened beverages causes chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer - the real causes of death among the studied subjects," the industry group said in a statement. "The researchers make a huge leap when they take beverage intake calculations from around the globe and allege that those beverages are the cause of deaths which the authors themselves acknowledge are due to chronic disease."

But the authors claim that five years of research has allowed them to draw solid conclusions linking high consumption of sugary drinks to the diseases that ultimately killed its victims.

"I think our findings should really impel policymakers to make effective policies to reduce sugary beverage consumption since it causes a significant number of deaths," Singh said, adding that she thinks "cause" is a fitting word despite the limitations of the association study.

Dr. Richard Besser, ABC News’ chief health and medical editor, compared sugary drinks to cigarettes – neither directly cause a person’s death, but both cause diseases that are often fatal.

"It is quite frightening to see the rise in chronic diseases as people around the world consume more and more sugary drinks," Besser said. "It reminds me of the way lung cancer is on the rise around the world as more and more people smoke cigarettes.".-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:RT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Malala Yousafzai has returned to school for the first time since she was shot in the head by the Taliban in October for campaigning for the education of girls.

The 15-year-old said on Tuesday that she had "achieved her dream" and was looking forward to meeting new friends at the independent Edgbaston High School for Girls in Birmingham, central England, where she is now living.
Malala was flown to Britain for surgery following the attack and underwent several operations as recently as last month.

"I am excited that today I have achieved my dream of going back to school," she said in a statement. "I want all girls in the world to have this basic opportunity."
"I miss my classmates from Pakistan very much but I am looking forward to meeting my teachers and making new friends here in Birmingham."
Pictures showed her going to school carrying a pink backpack and wearing a black headscarf over a green sweater.
She will be studying a full curriculum in preparation for selecting subjects for GCSEs, the exams that schoolchildren in England, Wales and Northern Ireland sit when they are aged between 14 and 16.
Global symbol
Malala was shot at point-blank range by a Taliban gunmen as her school bus travelled through northwest Pakistan's Swat Valley on October 9, in an attack that drew worldwide condemnation.

She has since become a global symbol of the campaign for girls' right to an education and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
UN education envoy and former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who has backed Malala's cause, said: "This is a great day for Malala, for her family - and for the cause of education worldwide.
"By her courage, Malala shows that nothing - not even bullets, intimidation or death threats - can stand in the way of the right of every girl to an education.
"I wish Malala and her family well as her courageous recovery continues."
Malala was discharged from hospital in early February after surgery to fit a custom-made piece of titanium to her skull, and an electronic implant to help restore hearing to her left ear.
Her father Ziauddin Yousafzai is serving as Brown's special adviser on education and her family have temporarily moved to Birmingham, a city with a large Pakistani population.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:AL Jazeerea

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –A donated human liver has been kept alive, warm and functioning outside a human being on a newly-developed machine and then successfully transplanted into patients in a medical world first.

A British team of doctors, engineers and surgeons announcing the achievement on Friday said it could be common practice in hospitals across the developed world within a few years, up to doubling the number of livers available for transplant.

So far the procedure has been performed on two patients on Britain's liver transplant waiting list and both are making excellent recoveries, the medical team told a news conference.

"It was astounding to see an initially cold, grey liver flushing with color once hooked up to our machine and performing as it would within the body," said Constantin Coussios, a professor of biomedical engineering at Oxford University and one of the machine's co-inventors.

"What was even more amazing was to see the same liver transplanted into a patient who is now walking around."

Currently livers destined for transplant are kept "on ice" in a process which cools them to slow down their metabolism and does not keep them functioning as they would inside a body.

This system has worked for several decades, but can also often lead to livers becoming damaged and rendered unfit for use in patients who need them.

Surgeons say keeping livers "on ice" beyond 14 hours starts becoming risky, although they can last up to 20 hours.

Hepatitis infection, alcohol abuse and drug-induced cholestasis - a blockage in the flow of bile from the liver - can all cause liver failure. Some patients with liver cancer can also benefit from a transplant.

Around 13,000 liver transplants are carried out each year in Europe and the United States, but there is a combined waiting list of around 30,000 patients who need a new liver.

Experts say up to a quarter of these patients die while they are waiting. At the same time, more than 2,000 livers are discarded every year because they are either damaged by oxygen deprivation or do not survive the cold preservation process.

The new technology, developed by Coussios together with Peter Friend, director of the Oxford Transplant Centre, preserves the liver at body temperature and "perfuses" it - supplying it with oxygenated red blood cells to keep it alive.

"This device is the very first completely automated liver perfusion device of its kind," Coussios said. "These first clinical cases confirm that we can support human livers outside the body, keep them alive and functioning on our machine and then, hours later, successfully transplant them into a patient."

"I FEEL SO ALIVE"

The device can keep a liver functioning normally - just as if in a person, with blood circulating through its capillaries and bile being produced - outside the body for 24 hours or more.

The results from the first two transplants using the new technology, carried out at King's College Hospital (KCH) in London last month, suggest the device could be useful for all patients needing liver transplants, Field told reporters.

The new device could also mean livers which would otherwise be discarded as unfit for transplantation could be preserved and made viable - potentially as much as doubling the number of organs available for transplant, he said.

"If we can introduce technology like this into everyday practice, it could be a real, bona fide game changer for transplantation as we know it," said Nigel Heaton, director of transplant surgery at KCH and part of the team that carried out the first two transplants using the device.

Coussios and Friend have been researching the technology for the device since 1994 and are developing it through an Oxford University spin-off company called OrganOx.

The first person to receive a transplanted liver kept alive on the OrganOx system was 62-year-old Briton Ian Christie. He is still recovering from the surgery but said in a statement he was getting better day by day. "I just feel so alive," he said.

Christie was told last year he had cirrhosis of the liver and had only 12 to 18 months to live unless he got a transplant. "I was placed on the waiting list but...I was very worried."

Having been through the surgery, he said: "I feel better than I've felt for 10 to 15 years, even allowing for the pain and wound that's got to heal."

The team now plans to run a pilot trial with 20 more liver transplant patients at KCH. Coussios said successful results of that trial would allow OrganOx to apply for marketing authority, meaning the device could be on the market by as early as 2014.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:Reuters

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Treating people with HIV rapidly after they have become infected with the virus that causes AIDS may be enough to achieve a "functional cure" in a small proportion of patients diagnosed early, according to new research.

Scientists in France who followed 14 patients who were treated very swiftly with HIV drugs but then stopped treatment found that even when they had been off therapy for more than seven years, they still showed no signs of the virus rebounding.

The research, published in the journal PLoS Pathogens, follows news earlier this month about a baby girl in Mississippi in the US being effectively cured of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) after receiving very early treatment.

Christine Rouzioux, a professor at Necker Hospital and University Paris Descartes and a member of the initial team who identified HIV 30 years ago, said the new results showed the number of infected cells circulating in the blood of these patients, known as "post-treatment controllers", kept falling even without treatment for many years.

"Early treatment in these patients may have limited the establishment of viral reservoirs, the extent of viral mutations, and preserved immune responses. A combination of those may contribute to control infection in post-treatment controllers," she said.

"The shrinking of viral reservoirs ... closely matches the definition of 'functional' cure," she said.

Functional cure

A functional cure describes when the virus is reduced to such low levels that it is kept at bay even without continuing treatment.

The virus, however, is still detectable in the body.

Most of the some 34 million people with HIV across the world will have to take anti-AIDS drugs known as antiretroviral therapy for the whole of their lives.

These drugs generally keep the disease in check but also have side effects and a high cost impact on health systems.

Worldwide, the number of people newly infected with HIV, which can be transmitted via blood and by semen during sex, is falling.

At 2.5 million, the number of new infections in 2011 was 20 percent lower than in 2001, according to the United National AIDS programme (UNAIDS). And deaths from AIDS fell to 1.7 million in 2011, down from a peak of 2.3 million in 2005.

Asier Saez-Cirion, a senior HIV researcher at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, said that although most patients will not be able to control HIV, these results suggest that at least some may be able to if they get treatment early enough.

"(This data) and the Mississippi study strongly support early treatment initiation and may hold important clues for the development of a strategy to cure HIV or at least induce a long-term control without the need of antiretroviral treatment," he said.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source:AL Jazeerea

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –The English professor says that uncontrolled and excessive use of antibiotics reduces resistance against microbes and is likely to make a simple operation fatally dangerous in the next twenty years if no measures are taken in the shortest time possible. The World Health Organization estimate that thousands of people die every year because of antibiotic-resistant infections. Out of every 4 deaths, one is infection-related and infections originating from hospitals have a large role to play in this context. If the desperately needed efforts are not expended to fill what Professor Dame Sally Davies calls " discovery void ", which is the insufficiency of new compounds to take the place of ineffective antibiotics, the huge problems faced in treating people in the pre- antibiotic era are to expected to emerge again. What is generally seen is that pharmaceutical companies , while concentrating on those medicines more lucrative than many others, fail to do studies to develop new and much more resistant antibiotics.

Experts say that no antibiotics should be used against such ailments as the flu, grippe and cold caused by viruses.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source:TRT

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –Deadly drug-resistant bacterial infections are on the rise in U.S. hospitals, and federal health officials are asking health care facilities around the country to take urgent action.

These so-called "superbugs" called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) are dangerous, according to the CDC. They kill one in two patients who develop bloodstream infections from them. Even the most powerful last-resort antibiotics can't treat them.

"CRE are nightmare bacteria. Our strongest antibiotics don't work and patients are left with potentially untreatable infections," Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in a statement. "Doctors, nurses, hospital leaders, and public health, must work together now to implement CDC's "detect and protect" strategy and stop these infections from spreading."

The CDC's new Vital Signs report, published March 5 on CDC.gov, details a decade-long rise in rates in inpatient medical care facilities like hospitals, nursing homes and long-term acute care centers that treat patients recovering from serious injuries and illnesses.

CRE infections are caused by a family of germs called Enterobacteriaceae that consist of 70 bacteria, including Klebsiella pneumonia (the bacteria that causes pneumonia and other infections) and E. coli that normally live in your digestive system. Some of the germs have become resistant to the strongest type of antibiotics called carbapenems. Almost all CRE infections happen to patients receiving serious medical care, the CDC said.

CRE were relatively uncommon in the U.S. in 2000, according to the report, which tracked infection rates at more than 3,900 U.S. hospitals from 2001 to 2012. The percentage of reported cases rose from 1 percent of patients in 2001 to 4.2 percent of patients ten years later, with the largest spike in Klebsiella infections.

Forty-two states reported having had at least one patient test positive for one type of CRE with most infections reported in the Northeast. About 18 percent of long-term acute care hospitals and about 4 percent of short-stay hospitals in the U.S. reported at least one CRE infection during the first half of 2012 alone.

While overall rates remain low, the CDC warns that CRE can spread their antibiotic resistance to other germs as well, and routine bladder or wound infections at hospitals could be deadly.

That's why the agency is calling on hospitals to follow an aggressive "Detect and Protect" action plan. Recommendations include enforcing infection control precautions, grouping patients with CRE together and dedicating staff, rooms and equipment to CRE to prevent transmission. Patients should tell doctors if they've been hospitalized in another facility, take their antibiotics exactly as prescribed and insist health care personnel wash their hands before touching them.

CRE can be carried by patients from one health care facility to another so the CDC encourages hospitals to work together regionally to implement CRE prevention programs.

Israel decreased CRE infection rates in all 27 of its hospitals by more than 70 percent in one year with a prevention program, the CDC reported as an example.

"We have seen in outbreak after outbreak that when facilities and regions follow CDC's prevention guidelines, CRE can be controlled and even stopped," said Dr. Michael Bell, acting director of CDC's Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion. "As trusted health care providers, it is our responsibility to prevent further spread of these deadly bacteria.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source:CBS