Superbugs threaten to make infections in hospitals impossible to treat. Here's why

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Glenn Barr was returning from work one long weekend a few years ago, when he suddenly felt terrible.

The Ottawa resident was soon vomiting blood onto his driveway. A trip to his nurse practitioner and then the emergency department eventually led to a diagnosis of end-stage cirrhosis of the liver, landing him on the transplant list.

After waiting four years to qualify and find a match, this Labour Day marked the second anniversary of his liver transplant. His medical teams were never able to determine what caused his liver damage.

But another part of the transplantation experience that caught him off guard were the half-dozen, hard-to-treat infections he endured. Barr faced fever, aches and diarrhea from the infections, both before and after the surgery. 

"I was incredibly sick," Barr recalled. "The doctors would open up my charts, and if it was a new doctor, you'd hear, 'Oh my. Oh Glenn.'"

Barr, a 67-year-old electrical contractor, needed many blood transfusions for internal bleeding and a series of procedures to get through the transplant and its complications, including an incision infection that couldn't be seen on the skin.

Doctors had to cut out the infected tissue and give antibiotics through an IV.

"They wouldn't let me out of the hospital for five weeks, until they were happy that the blood work that they saw was good," he said.

Increasingly, physicians worry that infections that typically kill people with weakened immune systems will expand to hit Canadians going in for routine surgery, especially as cases of drug-resistant bacterial and fungal pathogens become more common.

Drug or antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria, viruses or fungi evolve over time and ultimately stop responding to the treatments that once killed them, making infections harder to treat. Also called superbugs, the World Health Organization has declared these pathogens an urgent global public health threat.

According to a study published in The Lancet medical journal, they killed at least an estimated 1.27 million people worldwide in 2019 alone. And in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections each year.

For infectious disease physicians like Dr. Ilan Schwartz, the concern is that people coming to hospital for scheduled surgeries will also acquire infections that are untreatable or extremely difficult to control.

Superbugs threaten much of our modern medicine because they're resistant to the antibiotics used during routine surgeries or treatments, like C-sections, cancer care and joint replacements. Hospitals are rife with opportunities for potential exposure, including surgical cuts or the use of IVs, ventilators or catheters.