The bacteria can can colonise a person's bowel without making them sick. Bacteria similar to those found in human guts have an innate sense of night and day. Credit:Fairfax Media However, infectious disease specialist Kumar Visvanathan said the superbug may have led to the death of two patients at St Vincent's Hospital hospital last year. He said 28 cases had been diagnosed at St Vincent's since 2012, including 10 people who had fallen ill with an infection because of it. Those cases were found in both the Fitzroy campus and in the Ellerslie aged care unit of its St George's campus in Kew. The hospital has stepped up its infection control procedures with more screening of vulnerable patients, faster testing systems, steam cleaning of rooms, hand hygiene education and isolation of people found to be carrying the bug.

It has had five cases this year, with the last one occurring at its Ellerslie unit in March. The mental health system is in crisis, say health workers who speak out. Credit:Gabrielle Charlotte "We are committed to doing everything we can to eradicate KPC. While it's early days yet we believe we are having some success," said Associate Professor Visvanathan. "We think we have it under control now." While the first cases of KPC in Victoria were thought to be unrelated diagnoses in people likely to have picked it up overseas where it is more prevalent, health authorities were alarmed to see that it appeared to be spreading between patients this year.

The evidence of local transmission prompted the Department of Health to order hospitals to use maximum infection control procedures and to screen new patients who had travelled overseas in the last year. A department spokesman said the superbug had been detected in patients at other hospitals, but he would not name them. Associate Professor Visvanathan said KPC - a type of antibiotic-resistant bacteria known as Carbapenem resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) - did not respond to modern antibiotics, forcing doctors to use drugs from the 1940s, which carry more side effects. While this approach can be successful, Associate Professor Visvanathan fears the bacteria will stop responding to the old drugs at some stage and that no other options will be available for patients who fall ill with KPC. He said patients whose immune systems were compromised were most vulnerable to infections. KPC can be present in the bowels of a patient without causing clinical disease. This is known as colonisation. Some of these patients may develop infection such as urinary tract or blood stream infections that can become difficult to treat. Depending on how weak the patient is and how well they respond to antibiotics, this can be fatal.

Associate Professor Visvanathan said KPC had become more prevalent overseas in recent years, particularly in Greece, Italy and parts of Asia. People generally pick it up in hospitals where it is spread through contact with people's faeces, which can be transmitted to other surfaces. "It stays on surfaces for about four hours, so it's possible to get it from a surface...such as a sink tap," he said. "Someone could touch that and then put it in their mouth." Internationally, the increasing prevalence of KPC has been associated with death rates of up to 50 per cent in infected patients. Victoria's acting chief health officer Dr Finn Romanes said Victorian health services had been briefed about the need for heightened infection control measures in response to the cases. A statewide review of the problem continues, he said.

"All Victorian health services have been provided with information from the Department of Health & Human Services emphasising the need to ensure all current national standards are in place and being strictly followed," Dr Romanes said. Further information on antibiotic resistant bacteria can be found at the Better Health Channel.