LONDON — British health authorities have blamed the deaths of at least 90 people on a virulent bacterial infection that swept through three hospitals in south-central England, where patients allegedly were forced to defecate in their beds and wait for hours for clean sheets.
In one of the worst of a growing number of hospital infection outbreaks in Europe, an additional 255 deaths were partially linked to Clostridium difficile bacterium, which is resistant to many disinfectants and can become more deadly if patients are treated with the wrong antibiotics.
Britain has been reeling over the last year with reports of more than 6,300 hospital-based "superbug" infections at its government-run National Health Service facilities. Those cases of Staphylococcus, or staph, infections that are resistant to common antibiotics appear to be leveling off, while the number of C. difficile cases rose by 7% in 2006, to 56,000.
An intestinal bacterium capable of causing fatal diarrhea, C. difficile is worrisome because it can form spores that are difficult to eradicate with all but the most stringent cleaning.
Patients who are prescribed broad-based antibiotics by doctors unaware of their exposure to C. difficile often fall victim to rapidly worsening infection because the bacterium flourishes as competing bacteria in the intestines die.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown last month said Britain's hospitals would be cleaned "a ward at a time: walls, ceilings, fittings and ventilation shafts . . . disinfected and scrubbed clean." This week, the government pledged $280 million to help combat C. difficile and $260 million to screen incoming hospital patients for the drug-resistant staph known as MRSA.
Health investigators and patients said the hospitals in the study were beset by nursing shortages. Beds were jammed within a foot of each other, and the administration was preoccupied with meeting budget targets, patients reported.
The daughter of an 87-year-old war veteran who died after being left with soiled sheets and bedsores said her father told her: "What have I done to deserve a place like this?"
"They were taking three hours to change his sheets," Jackie Nixon, whose complaints helped initiate the commission review, said in a telephone interview.
Hospital officials said they were implementing strict anti-infection procedures, including a $2-million cleaning program and new policies on hygiene and antibiotic use.
