THE prevalence of patients infected with hospital bugs in Scotland's acute wards has halved in a decade but they remain a "significant burden", a watchdog has warned.

One in 22 adult patients at any one time was found to have a healthcare associated infection (HAI) such as MRSA in the most recent survey in 2016, down from one in 10 when the rates were first examined in 2005/6.

However, the report by Health Protection Scotland said the problem still equates to one patient in every ward, in every hospital across Scotland - or 55,500 infections every year.

Prevalence was highest among patients in intensive care, where one in nine patients were found to have a hospital infection compared to fewer than three per hundred among children on paediatric wards.

The most common reported infections in the 2016 survey were urinary tract infections and pneumonia, which together accounted for almost half of all HAI. Surgical site infections - picked up by patients during operations - accounted for one in six and almost one in ten were bloodstream infections.

The microbe E. coli was also newly identified as the leading cause of healthcare associated infections in the survey in cases where microbiology data was available, leading Health Protection Scotland to warn that new infection prevention measures are needed to tackle the changing risk.

The watchdog although warned that that antibiotic prescribing has increased significantly in the past five years and poses "serious implications for the threat of antibiotic resistance".

More than a third of patients in acute care hospitals were receiving at least one antimicrobial at the time of survey with more than 13 per cent of patients on two or more.

Professor Jacqui Reilly, lead consultant for HAIs, antimicrobial resistance and infection prevention control at Health Protection Scotland, said: "Healthcare associated infections remain a public health threat across all care settings.

"The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has recently confirmed that these infections represent the highest burden of all communicable diseases monitored in Europe. Health Protection Scotland will develop national programmes to tackle these new threats and work with NHS colleagues to preserve antibiotics for future use.

"We will particularly focus on those broader spectrum ones which are last resort antibiotics, as when these stop working there are no new antibiotics in the pipeline to treat many of these new infection types we are seeing."

It comes after Alistair Leonard, the Scottish Government's infection adviser and a consultant microbiologist warned in March that antibiotic use in Scotland is three times above recommended levels.

Experts say there should be no more than 250 antibiotic prescriptions per 1,000 people per year to stave of superbug crisis, but in Scotland it is around 700 compared to 300 in Sweden and the Netherlands. in order to prevent a superbug crisis where dangerous bacteria become completely resistant to treatment.

The rise of antibiotic resistant infections could render routine procedures such as hip replacements so risky that four-fifths of patients could die be antibiotics would no longer be effective.

Mr Leonard said: "If we were to have an outbreak today, the UK Risk Register estimates that it would be around 200,000 effected patients with antimicrobial resistance, of which 80,000 would die."