December 2019
The Telegraph reports that the number of people contracting potentially deadly E.coli infections has risen sharply, despite a Government pledge to wage “war on superbugs”. Official figures show the number of infections have risen by more than a third since 2013. Experts said shortages of nurses could be fuelling the trend, with rushed staff paying insufficient attention to infection control. In 2016, then-health secretary Jeremy Hunt promised to halve so-called gram-negative bloodstream infections – two thirds of which are E. coli cases – by 2020.