‘I couldn’t hug or touch my mother’

To eliminate the bacteria, doctors were forced to stop Aerti’s chemotherapy and remove the catheter that provided her life-saving cancer drugs and nutrition — an extremely risky move given the severity of her diagnosis.

Aerti was placed in an isolation ward for several weeks. “I couldn’t hug or touch my mother, it really devastated me,” she told ECDC.

After a final course of antibiotics, doctors finally cleared the infection from Aerit’s bloodstream, and she later recovered from cancer as well. “I am fully aware that my success story is dramatically close to the stories of other patients who have not won these battles,” she said.

The ECDC is set to introduce new measures for member states to follow in an effort to tackle AMR, which will be the first time standardized guidelines are rolled out in healthcare settings across EU member states.

They include a series of recommendations, including exceeding basic measures such as prioritizing hand washing.

Unwashed hands are a major way that doctors, nurses and other health care providers unintentionally pass drug-resistant infections from one patient to another.

The guidelines also encourage hospitals to build capacity for isolation rooms so that patients infected with resistant bacteria cannot spread the infection to others in the area.

“Fighting AMR means saving lives, protecting our healthcare systems and the foundations of modern medicine,” said ECDC’s Pamela Rendi-Wagner.

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