Addie Rerecich Case Study

Addie Rerecich was an eleven and a half year of girl who was just as normal as any other kid her age. She played sports and was very social. All that changed one night when she woke up complaining of some pain in her hip. Her mother thought it was just a simple softball injury, so she gave her some ibuprofen and sent her back to bed. When the pain didn’t subside, she was taken to the hospital. Initially the doctors said she had symptoms of a virus. The next day she could breath well and they said she now had pneumonia. When at the hospital the disease specialist said Addie had “community-aquired” resistant staphylococcus MRSA from picking her scabs. This infection caused damage in her lungs and was so bad she was then put on ECMO, total life

She got a new disease called stenotrophomonas, which is very difficult to treat. She was becoming pan-resistant, meaning she was resistant to everything. She had a bacteria called Gram negative. This bacteria has an armor formed around the negative bacteria that makes it harder for normal antibiotics to cure it. She was left with only one option, a lung transplant. For one, it was a very risky option since her body was so weak, and two, she would have to wait until a transplant even came up for her to have. She ended up getting the lung transplant though. Two years after she came home from the operation and she is still alive, but she has to be very cautious every day. She takes a handful of prescriptions twice a day and still picks up bacteria easily. Her mom said she has gotten pneumonia twice already. Her life is now extremely difficult, but she is at least

Five weeks later, after the cured patient left, KPC was in the respiratory culture and they didn 't know how it was spreading or how to cure it. To prevent it from spreading even more around the hospital, the hospital put signs up to remind people to wash their hands, they had robots clean rooms, they moved all the KCP patients into an isolated ICU and they built a wall up to separate them even more. They finally figured out that the bacteria was being passed by silent carriers, people who don 't know they have the bacteria. This was figured out through DNA sequencing. Six months after patient one had arrived, the outbreak was finally over, but it had infected eighteen people in the process and left six