CRE Infection
CRE is the abbreviation of carbapenem-resistant enterobacteriaceae. Carbapenem is a class of antibiotics that are prescribed to treat severe infections when other antibiotics have failed to disinfect the condition. These types of organisms are found resistant to almost all classes of antibiotics that are used to treat CRE infections, hence it is also called “nightmare bacteria”. In this condition, treatment of CRE infections becomes impossible, possibly death.
Causes of CRE Infection
Enterobacteriaceae are generally live in human digestive system, but never hurt them. According to CDC, when these bacteria travel to other organs of the body, they start hurting them and cause severe bacterial infection.
Carbapenem is a class of antibiotics that acts as a last resort for the complete removal of Enterobacteriaceae from your body. Sometimes excessive intake of antibiotics makes Enterobacteriaceae resistant to nearly all available antibiotics, leading to CRE infections.
CRE bacteria can able to produce some enzymes that do not support most antibiotics and are capable to neutralize the action of these powerful medicines. Hence, most antibiotics lose their efficiency to kill these types of bacteria. The disease becomes extremely untreatable when they spread their antibiotic-resistant features to other healthy bacteria in the body.
How these infections are transmitted?
CRE infections can be transmitted through infected people or medical equipment. When people come in direct contact with the bodily fluid of infected people such as blood, fluid draining from a wound, urine, stool or phlegm, they become infected. It is highly possible for health-care professionals because they mostly come in contact with infected people in hospital and spread the same bacteria to other healthy patient when they touch them. In this way these infections get multiplied.
Sometimes these bacteria live on medical equipment and a dirty surface and travel to others body when they touch them. However the survival time of these bacteria on the contaminated surface is not known.
Symptoms of CRE infections
Several infections can be seen such as blood infections, pneumonia and urinary infections, in people with CRE bacteria, but it depends on the organ that gets infected with it. Hence the symptoms of CRE infections can be vary for each person depending on the organ which has infection, but mostly fever and chills appear in the patient.
How to diagnose CRE infections?
Diagnosis of CRE infections is very easy. A blood culture needs to be done to detect the type of infection. People generally go to a lab and give their blood sample so that laboratory professionals could identify what types of bacteria are growing in their blood.
Source: https://www.livescience.com/50041-cre-symptoms-treatment.html
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