“We need a surveillance system that goes beyond Covid“. This is what infectious disease specialist Matteo Bassetti, director of infectious diseases at the San Martino polyclinic hospital in Genoa, told Adnkronos Salute.
“Today we monitor infectious diseases that are subject to notification (from viral hepatitis to meningitis) but there are others to follow that have become more frequent and that do not require any notification, for example hospital pneumonia, community pneumonia, ventilator-associated pneumonia, or sepsis, even serious forms of infection, no one in Italy knows these numbers – Bassetti underlines – Scientific societies do studies but they are limited to limited periods, then some regions have virtuous surveillance systems such as Tuscany, Emilia Romagna and Fvg. But others have nothing and the national data is misleading and limited. We are very far from other EU countries. We need a surveillance system that goes beyond Covid: where there is a microbiological diagnosis of an infection confirmed by laboratories, both public and private, a report should be compiled indicating the infection and the type, everything should be managed by a centralized body”.
“Then we could make a monthly report with all the data – which should be mandatory for local health authorities and hospitals – so we could understand which are the resistant bacteria”, the infections “from sensitive bacteria and which syndromes we have – he adds – We would then need a centralized body that analyzes these regional data well with an infection surveillance system. Only in this way would we understand the magnitude of the infection phenomenon, we only know about Covid but the rest is not very interesting and this is very wrong”.
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