The inability of hospitals to control the spread of the winter vomiting bug once a patient becomes infected provides little hope they will be able to curb the spread of flu if there is a pandemic, a consultant microbiologist said yesterday.
Prof Martin Cormican, president of the Irish Society of Clinical Microbiologists, said once the winter vomiting bug got into a hospital, there were problems controlling its spread due to lack of isolation facilities.
"Our hospitals are too full of too many people all the time. Hospitals should be run at 85 per cent capacity as their baseline whereas in most hospitals in Ireland not only are all the beds full at any one time but there are people on trolleys in A&E waiting to get into beds that are not available," he said.
"In any healthcare system in the world this virus [ the norovirus, otherwise known as the winter vomiting bug] is likely to be introduced from time to time. But how much of a problem it causes once it gets in is very much dependent on how good the healthcare system is at controlling infection."
The current outbreak at Dublin's St Vincent's Hospital continued to worsen yesterday. Ten new cases were recorded. The bug is now in virtually every ward, with some 173 patients having succumbed to infection to date. In addition 105 staff members have also been affected.
"Despite the hospital taking all the necessary precautions to curtail the spread of this highly contagious virus, practically all ward areas are affected, including parts of the emergency department," a hospital spokesman said.
The bug has also affected a number of other hospitals, but to a lesser extent.
Prof Cormican said that in general there are insufficient infection control staff in hospitals. Some have no infection control doctors. "There is all this talk about preparing for an influenza pandemic but if we can't stop the norovirus spreading, how do we think we can stop an influenza pandemic spreading?"
He stressed that the norovirus was brought into hospitals by patients, staff or visitors who spread it before they themselves had symptoms - unlike MRSA, strains of which tend to be resident in hospitals.
Dr Robert Cunney, consultant microbiologist with the Health Protection Surveillance Centre, said the bug caused problems even in healthcare systems much better resourced than the Republic's. However, he agreed better isolation facilities would help.
St Vincent's has asked people not to visit patients or to attend its A&E unit if they have the bug.