Non-Environmental Cost-Benefit News

New research from Resources for the Future (RFF), in collaboration with colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and Princeton University, highlights the need for a regionally coordinated investment plan among hospitals to prevent transmission of hospital-acquired infections.

Antibiotic resistance in these infections is becoming more frequent. According to the research, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the proliferation of drug-resistant pathogens in hospitals is a serious public health threat that has economic as well as biological causes. The problem is likely to be worse in areas with greater concentrations of medical treatment facilities.

"Hospitals invest in infection control based on how many patients are already infected, and how transmissible the pathogen is," stated Ramanan Laxminarayan, RFF fellow and co-author of the report. "Hospitals in areas with more facilities will likely each invest less, on average, than hospitals in areas with fewer facilities, because more facilities in an area mean less control that each hospital has over overall levels of resistance."

In areas where there are more hospitals, investment is lower not only because shared patients and staff increase the rate of transmission, but also because hospitals will assume other facilities will cover the costs. For any given facility, there is no guarantee that investment in preventing the transmission of hospital-acquired infections will actually pay off, since patients and staff coming from other local facilities could inadvertently undermine those efforts.

"Under the current system, there's no point in asking individual hospitals in urban areas to spend more on transmission prevention," Laxminarayan noted. "The only way to guarantee results is to implement a coordinated investment plan for hospitals in a region, so all parties have a vested interest in holding up their end of the bargain, and can be held accountable for failing to do so."

Laxminarayan commented that he and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health and Princeton University are now working to put together region-specific information to give healthcare facilities in urban areas more concrete advice on coordinating investments.

Resources for the Future, an independent and nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think-tank, seeks to improve environmental and natural resource policymaking worldwide through objective social science research of the highest caliber.
For a copy of the paper: Leikny Johnson, 202-334-1310

http://www.rff.org/rff/News/Releases/2005Releases/Antibiotic-Resistance-to-Hospital-Acquired-Infections-Increasing.cfm
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