Hospitals Cut MRSA Infections By Half

Brown congratulated NHS staff on the achievement in an open letter released by Downing Street.

Hospitals have succeeded in halving superbug MRSA infections over four years, hitting a government target and cheering Prime Minister Gordon Brown as he seeks to relaunch his leadership.

The number of MRSA bloodstream infections recorded in England in the three months to June fell to 836, a drop of 14 percent on the previous quarter and down 36 percent on the same quarter last year, the Health Protection Agency said.

The Department of Health said this meant National Health Service hospitals had hit a target set in November 2004 by then Health Secretary John Reid to halve the quarterly level of infections from 1,925 by March 2008.

But Conservative Health Spokesman Andrew Lansley said the government had only succeeded by moving the goalposts and adopting a "convoluted" way of measurement.

Brown congratulated NHS staff on the achievement in an open letter released by Downing Street.

"Today's results should make you proud of your achievements and proud of our NHS," he said.

Brown had pledged to tackle superbugs in a keynote speech at last year's Labour Party conference.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said the government's strategy for fighting hospital-acquired infections was clearly delivering results.

Since last year Johnson has ordered a "deep clean" of all hospitals, strict hand-cleaning regimes and a requirement for medical staff to wear short-sleeved tunics to avoid passing on infection.

But while MRSA infection levels have continued to fall from their peak in 2003 and 2004, another hospital-acquired bug, Clostridium difficile is proving harder to tackle.

Figures released in July showed that C. difficile cases in patients aged 65 and over rose in the first three months of the year, although annual figures revealed a nine percent fall in cases during 2007.

The number of deaths linked to C. difficile jumped by more than a quarter last year to over 8,300, while MRSA-linked deaths were 3.5 percent lower at 1,593, the first decline since records began in 1993.