Cancer. Heart disease. Diabetes. Influenza. Automobile crashes. The U.S. does a good job tracking the top causes of death among Americans. And with good reason.
Knowing what afflicts whom, and where, is the first step in mustering money and manpower to reduce preventable deaths. Another major killer has for years been making frequent, dramatic appearances in the media: antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Insidious “superbugs,” spawned by the very drugs meant to kill them and thriving in health care settings, wreak havoc on individual lives and the health care system. But 15 years after declaring antibiotic resistance a grave health threat, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has done little beyond urging vigilance and offering an estimate of annual deaths: 23,000.
In 2015, a team of journalists at Reuters set out to answer a simple question: Just how bad is the problem? The result of their yearlong investigation, “The Uncounted,” for the first time provided the public with a shocking truth: The CDC’s estimate of 23,000 deaths a year was, at best, “an impressionist painting,” as one official put it, of no use for effective surveillance and probably off by many thousands. It turns out that America’s vast epidemiological infrastructure, starting at the hospital bedside and extending all the way to the CDC, isn’t actually counting and tracking “superbug” deaths and illnesses, with dire consequences for the public health.
And it’s happening, Reuters discovered, for disturbing reasons: State and federal public health bureaucracies are unwilling or unable to impose real-time surveillance on a health care industry reluctant to document a problem it helped to create.