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Authorities in both the United States and Great Britain are outlining a potentially catastrophic threat to public health: a spike in the appearance of drug-resistant bacteria in healthcare institutions. And there's reason to believe that the so-called "superbug" could be a longer-term problem here, especially given the lack of a response plan and especially for older people in the U.S. No location is exactly safe, but before you freak out, here's some much needed context.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control held a press conference to brief reporters on CRE; officially, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. In layman's terms, CRE are bacteria which live inside the body but can cause infections if they travel out of the gut. The title "Carbapenem-resistant" indicates those bacteria resistant to a particular class of antibiotic — an increasing occurrence. Subsequent interviews with health officials have, in turn, seen an increasing occurrence of words like "catastrophic" being bandied about.

But Maryn McKenna (who literally wrote the book on such superbugs) participated in the press conference and reported on it for Wired, and, well, yeah — it's bad:

Here’s what the CDC announced Tuesday: Healthcare institutions in 42 states have now identified at least one case of CRE.

The occurrence of this resistance in the overall family of bacteria has risen at least four-fold over 10 years.

In the CDC’s surveillance networks, 4.6 percent of hospitals and 17.8 percent of long-term care facilities diagnosed this bug in the first half of 2012.

Those are dire reports.

The CDC data breaks down as follows. Bars below indicate the number of surveyed medical facilities that demonstrated the presence of CRE.