The CDC is sounding the alarm about a potentially deadly superbug, carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), on the rise in hospitals around the country. After a recent uptick in the recorded cases of the drug-resistant bug, federal health officials released a report urging medical professionals to do their best to prevent CRE from spreading further — but this week, the CDC is upping the ante, warning that the “nightmare bacteria” represents one of the biggest threats to patient safety in our nation’s hospitals.

CRE bacteria are resistant to even last-resort forms of antibiotics. Even though they remain relatively rare, health officials are worried about the dramatic spike over the last decade. The national percentage of CRE cases jumped from 1.2 percent in 2001 to 4.2 percent in 2011 — an increase of about 250 percent. The CDC is warning that, if the medical industry doesn’t find a way to contain the spread of the superbug, it will eventually make its way outside of hospital settings and into the broader community:

“These are nightmare bacteria that present a triple threat,” said Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “They’re resistant to nearly all antibiotics. They have high mortality rates, killing half of people with serious infections. And they can spread their resistance to other bacteria.”

So far, this particular class of superbug, called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, or CRE, has been found only in hospitals or nursing homes, rather than in the community, Frieden said. But officials sounded the alarm partly because, if the bacteria’s spread isn’t contained soon, even common infections could become untreatable. [...]

These superbugs are “the biggest threat to patient safety in the hospital that we have,” said Costi Sifri, an infectious disease physician and hospital epidemiologist at the University of Virginia Health System. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like anything is slowing their spread.”

People with compromised immune systems, who are either hospitalized for a long time or living in a nursing time, are most at risk for contracting the superbug. About 4 percent of hospitals in the U.S. have had at least one patient with CRE, and that figure rises to 18 percent for long-term, acute-care hospitals — although the CDC points out those numbers could actually be underestimations. There’s no reliable national data on the bacteria because the overwhelming majority of states don’t require hospitals to report any information on their CRE cases, and there’s no federal reporting requirement either.

Even though CRE cases remain rare, the threat of drug-resistant antibiotics is a serious issue with potentially disastrous implications. The CDC’s Friedan pointed out that one of the most troubling things about CRE bugs is the fact that they can transfer their antibiotic resistance to other bacteria — hastening the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases, which is already a growing global health issue, even further.

For the 11th straight year, a record number of Americans have died from a prescription drug overdose, the Tampa Bay Times reports.

While drug overdoses are up in general, a full 60 percent of them now involve prescription medication rather than illicit substances. As Dr. Thomas Frieden of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) told the Times, it’s “a big problem that has gotten much worse quickly,” and most of the deaths are accidental rather than suicide:

As in recent years, opioid drugs — which include OxyContin and Vicodin — were the biggest problem, contributing to three out of four medication overdose deaths.

Frieden said that many doctors and patients don’t realize how addictive these drugs can be, and that they’re too often prescribed for pain that can be managed with less risky drugs.

They’re useful for cancer, “but if you’ve got terrible back pain or terrible migraines,” using these addictive drugs can be dangerous, he said.

Medication-related deaths accounted for 22,134 of the drug overdose deaths in 2010.

Antianxiety drugs including Valium were among common causes of medication-related deaths, involved in almost 30 percent of them. Among the medication-related deaths, 17 percent were suicides.

The surge in medication-related deaths has already forced state authorities to take action. For example, the NYPD has begun implanting GPS chips into medicine bottles in order to battle the illegal trafficking and abuse of prescription drugs.

Still, such tracking efforts remain difficult, and the U.S. doesn’t have a very effective system of tracing a drug from its origins to consumers. And according to a recently-released Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) report, more than half of prescription drug abusers received their drugs from a family member or friend, making public health efforts to crack down on the abuse all the more difficult.

The United States’ persistently high rates of sexually transmitted infections are incurring billions of dollars in medical costs, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just in time for Valentines Day. The new report details what one of the CDC researchers describes as “an ongoing, severe, STI epidemic” in this country.

The U.S. has the highest rate of STDs of any nation in the industrialized world, with roughly 110 million total incidents of infection in 2008. Treating all of those infections cost the country about $16 billion, the CDC estimated. And the the ongoing issue is hitting young adults the hardest: Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 years old account for just 25 percent of the nation’s sexually active population, but as much as half of all sexually transmitted infections.

Health officials explain that, although the high cost of STDs is entirely preventable, Americans aren’t taking enough steps to safeguard their sexual health — particularly in regards to the HPV vaccine, which too few adolescents are receiving:

“STIs take a big health and economic toll on men and women in the United States, especially our youth,” CDC epidemiologist Catherine Lindsey Satterwhite, who led the study of incidence and prevalence, told NBC News. [...]

The story could have been different, insisted Matthew Golden, the director of Public Health Seattle and King County HIV/STD Program and a professor of medicine at the University of Washington Center for AIDS and STD. The good news, he said, is that rates for most viral and bacterial infections, including HIV, have stabilized or even dropped.

The “epidemic” Satterwhite speaks of, he said, is driven almost entirely by two bugs: HPV, and chlamydia. Chlamydia, a bacterial infection, is easily curable if it’s diagnosed. And there’s a very effective vaccine for the most dangerous forms of HPV that can trigger cervical, oral, anal, and penile cancers, and cause genital warts.

But, Golden argued, “we have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” by not pursuing effective strategies, such as school-based universal access to the HPV vaccine.

Satterwhite’s study estimated that HPV is by far the most common STD in the United States, with 14.1 million new HPV infections in 2008 as well as 79.1 million ongoing infections that were already prevalent that year. Yet previous CDC reports have found that unacceptably low numbers of Americans are getting vaccinated for HPV, as just about 35 percent of girls between 13 and 17 have received their recommended HPV shots in 2011 — a sobering statistic that contributes to the fact that HPV-related cancers have been on the rise over the last several years.

Right-wing hysteria surrounding the HPV vaccine has misconstrued it as somehow related to sexual promiscuity. In reality, it’s simply a preventative measure to protect Americans’ sexual health, and federal officials recommend it should be administered to girls and boys starting at the age of 11.

But conservative fearmongering around issues related to sexuality — which has contributed to a shame-based culture that pushes ineffective abstinence-only education on youth, rather than fully educating them about their bodies — has directly impacted the current public health epidemic. “How could we possibly have done this to ourselves?” Golden asked. “We have a solution; we have to make it happen.”

Today marks the 13th annual National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day. Begun in 2000 by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and grassroots public health organizations, National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day was launched as part of a widespread effort to curb the rate of HIV infection among black men and women through “education, testing, involvement, and treatment.”

While it is well established that HIV/AIDS has had a devastating effect on people in developing nations — particularly India and much of the African continent — the epidemic has also been deadly for the United States’ black community. Here are three things to keep in mind about HIV/AIDS and black America today:

1. HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects African Americans and the urban poor. African American men accounted for 70 percent of new HIV infections in 2009, and overall, African Americans made up 44 percent of new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. That translates to 20,000 black men and women in the United States testing positive for HIV every year — and that doesn’t account for the HIV-positive members of the black community who haven’t yet been diagnosed. All told, black Americans are eight times more likely than white Americans to be HIV-positive, and ten times more likely to die from the disease. The epidemic is divided among economic lines, too. The urban poor, overrepresented by African Americans in the country’s major metropolitan areas, are also burdened with unusually high rates of HIV/AIDS. Those living just above the poverty line are three times as likely to be infected than the national average, and those below the poverty line six times more likely to be infected than the national average.

2. GOP lawmakers have been slashing funding for HIV testing and treatment under Medicaid. Although the U.S. Preventative Task Force recommended that all community health clinics — which serve poorer regions — conduct free HIV testing, many centers haven’t had enough resources to follow through. And the issue has been exacerbated by Republican governors who have refused to implement Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion. Expanding Medicaid would extend insurance coverage to millions of low-income Americans, including more access to HIV testing and treatments. Instead, some GOP leaders are making aggressive cuts to their state-level Medicaid programs — like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), who recently slashed a case management program for low-income HIV patients.

3. The future of HIV/AIDS treatment is bright. Despite the myriad of challenges facing the Americans who suffer from HIV/AIDS, public health officials remain optimistic about the coming years. The life expectancy for HIV-positive Americans has been steadily increasing due to more effective treatment regimens, and despite some lawmakers’ best efforts to undermine progress, access to HIV testing and coverage for treatments has been on the rise. And a cure may even be on the horizon — just last month, a team of researchers in Spain made an important breakthrough by creating a a new HIV vaccine that is much more effective — and less expensive — than any earlier attempts.

In a new report, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) proclaims that American adults are receiving vaccinations for whooping cough, shingles, and pneumonia at “unacceptably low” rates.

While the report found increases in the number of Americans receiving TDAP — tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis — and HPV vaccines, it also concluded that there was “little improvement in coverage for the other vaccines among adults in the United States.” CDC officials told reporters that the low vaccination rates could have to do with confusion over the proper vaccination schedules:

There were “modest gains” in coverage for the Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis) and HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccines, said CDC researcher and study co-author Dr. Carolyn Bridges during a phone call with reporters. Nearly 13% of people 19 to 64 years old reported receiving a Tdap vaccine in 2011, which was an increase of almost four percentage points from the previous year, she said; the number of adults living with an infant under a year old who received the vaccine was up around 11 points to 22%. Pertussis is particularly dangerous in infants.

Regarding HPV vaccination, adult women are advised to complete a series of three injections by age 26. Thirty percent of women ages 19 to 26 had received one or more doses of that vaccine in 2011, up from 21% in 2010. (In 2011, health officials added men up to the age of 21 to the list of people advised to get the vaccine, but the effects of that change aren’t available in the current data, which was collected in the 2011 National Health Interview Survey.) [...]

During the phone call with reporters, Bridges acknowledged that many adults might be confused about what vaccines they need; schedules vary depending on the vaccine and on a patient’s individual risk. She urged those people to ask their healthcare provider if they were due for any shots.

Even in areas where there has been improvement, vaccination rates are still woefully low — for example, just 30 percent of U.S. women receive one or more of their recommended HPV vaccines. That may partly be due to coverage gaps and a lack of proper information regarding vaccines. But it also speaks to the baffling misinformation spread by conspiracy theorists — and some Republican politicians — regarding the safety and efficacy of vaccines.

Doctors and medical experts have consistently advocated for more robust vaccination rates, and study after study has confirmed vaccination schedules’ ability to lower the spread of infectious diseases. But even during the worst flu epidemic in years, Americans remain remarkably resistant to taking their medicine.

A new government report finds that one in five safety-net health centers — federally funded clinics that serve low-income Americans — aren’t routinely testing patients for HIV, even though the Centers for Disease Control began encouraging regular HIV tests back in 2005.

As the global community has continued to make strides to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic over the past several years, health experts have gradually expanded their guidelines on HIV testing, pointing out that the best defense against the spread of the virus is educating all Americans about their HIV status. The U.S. Preventative Task Force, a government-backed panel that determines what preventative health care will be covered under Obamacare, updated their recommendations last year to make HIV testing as routine as regular blood pressure screenings in annual check-ups.

Nevertheless, the health centers that provide care for the country’s poorest residents don’t have enough funding to make sure they can screen everyone for the virus:

The health centers, all of which received money from the federal Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), reported a lack of financial resources from patients and sites as one factor that limited their HIV testing.

“Respondents from one health center site reported that patients who were not eligible for free HIV tests were unlikely to pay for tests, and respondents from another health center site reported that patients had difficulty paying even the small office visit fee, let alone an additional testing fee,” the report said. [...]

HRSA funds grantees that administer clinics for community health, migrant health, homeless health, and public housing primary care. In 2011, such sites provided care to more than 17 million patients, and, with the CDC estimating one in five people in the U.S. living with HIV doesn’t know his status, HRSA centers can play a critical role in reducing the transmission of the virus, the [Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General] said.

The health clinics that are currently forced to prioritize their resources for HIV testing often can’t focus on regular screenings because they only test patients who categorized at “high-risk” for contracting the virus. But it’s important to do regular screening even for patients who don’t exhibit symptoms, or don’t appear to be at a high risk for contracting HIV, since an estimated 220,000 HIV-positive Americans don’t know their HIV status. In fact, half of the HIV-positive individuals between those ages of 13 and 24 aren’t aware they have the virus because they don’t get tested regularly — which is partly why that age group contributes to more than a quarter of the country’s new HIV infections each year.

Fortunately, Obamacare prioritizes funding for the community health centers that are often on the front lines of providing care for the nation’s most vulnerable populations. Under the health reform law, more than $125 million in grant money will be awarded to about 200 safety-net clinics across the country. If fully implemented, that increased funding will allow community clinics to serve more than twice as many people by 2019 — and potentially better adhere to the CDC’s guidelines on HIV testing.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made it official on Friday: This year’s severe flu season is an epidemic . It passed the threshold last week, with 7.3 percent of deaths from influenza or pneumonia. Forty-seven states are now reporting widespread activity after the season got to an especially early start.

Vaccination remains the “best tool we have to prevent the flu,” and the best time to receive a vaccine is before the season even starts. Even so, well over half of Americans neglect to get their flu shots. With the season well underway, some areas are reporting vaccine shortages.

One interesting measurement of flu season trends is Google search data for flu-related terms, which has skyrocketed in recent weeks. But this chart from the CDC, showing hospital visitors with flu-like symptoms, might provide a more appropriate context:

Vice President Joe Biden, chair of the White House working group on gun law reform, announced on Thursday that the Obama administration would likely propose reforms to a series of little-known, National Rifle Association (NRA) supported regulations that severely restrict the use of federal money to support research on gun violence. According to the Washington Post, Biden’s comments highlighted the serious gaps in medical and epidemiological knowledge about guns caused by the current restrictions:

Biden also mentioned strengthening the ability of federal agencies to conduct research about gun violence. He drew a comparison between current limits on federal gathering of data about gun violence and 1970s-era restrictions on federal research into the causes of traffic fatalities. Biden stressed a need for the government to collect information about “what kind of weapons are used most to kill people” and “what kind of weapons are trafficked weapons.”

The anti-science restrictions Biden is discussing date back to the 1990s. Alarmed by growing scientific research on the health risks created by the widespread prevalence of guns, the NRA and its Congressional allies stripped all funding for the Center for Disease Control’s gun research budget. They also inserted a provision into the CDC appropriation bills that said “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control,” deterring the CDC from providing significant funds to gun research ever since. As a result, the New York Times reports, “the amount of money available today for studying the impact of firearms is a fraction of what it was in the mid-1990s, and the number of scientists toiling in the field has dwindled to just a handful as a result.” This has meant in practice that “there is no scientific consensus on the best approach to limiting gun violence, and the N.R.A. is blocking work that might well lead to such a consensus.”

A letter sent to the White House working group warned of the tragic health consequences of this research dearth, noting that “medical treatment of gunshot wounds costs an estimated $2 billion annually, half of which comes from taxpayer dollars” and that the “total costs of gun violence to American society are on the order of $100 billion per year.” Moreover, as the Center for American Progress’ Jonathan Moreno points out, “Taxpayers support the CDC because its job is to reduce Americans’ deaths and injuries, but though gun violence is the leading cause of death of African Americans ages 15-24, its website doesn’t even link to information about firearm violence prevention.”

The few intrepid researchers who have been able to find funding outside the government have perhaps discovered why the NRA is so afraid of more research in this area. Scholars at Harvard University have put together strong evidence that more guns mean more deaths, while researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a clear, evidence-based set of policy proposals for common-sense reforms to America’s gun laws.

CBS News reports that cancers related to human papillomavirus (HPV) has been on the rise over the last two years, largely because not enough people are getting vaccinated against HPV. Even though fewer numbers of Americans have been dying from cancer over the last two decades, a annual joint report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Cancer Institute finds that HPV-related cancers have ballooned:

The new report found increases in rates for HPV-associated oropharyngeal cancer (throat cancer) among white men and women, in addition to rises in anal cancer rates among white and black men and women.

Alcohol and smoking can also lead to these cancers, however, HPV accounts for about 70 percent of the cancers in this area, [Dr. Michael B. Prsytowsky] said.[...]

“We need to get adolescent children — both boys and girls — vaccinated before they’re sexually active,” Prsytowsky said. “Parents need to understand the vaccine is safe and effective and prevents disease down the road.”

The report found that less than half of girls ages 13 to 17 got at least one dose of the recommended HPV vaccine. The government’s Healthy People 2020 campaign aims to have 80 percent of eligible girls vaccinated by the next decade.

While Obamacare provides support for wellness initiatives and eliminates co-pays for HPV screenings, such provisions are useless if Americans buy into the widely-debunked conservative hysteria that the HPV vaccine is unsafe. 2012 GOP presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went as far as to claim that the vaccine causes “mental retardation” in girls, and other Republicans have falsely asserted that it somehow leads to sexual promiscuity.

Conversely, medical professionals urge Americans to safeguard their health by receiving their recommended vaccinations. “We must face these hurdles head on, without distraction, and without delay, by expanding access to proven strategies to prevent and control cancer,” Dr. John R. Seffrin, the chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society explained in response to the rising rates of HPV-related diseases.