California State Senator Introduces Bill That Would Mandate Reporting of 'Superbug' Infections, Deaths (reuters.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A California state senator introduced a bill on Monday that would mandate reporting of antibiotic-resistant infections and deaths and require doctors to record the infections on death certificates when they are a cause of death. The legislation also aims to establish the nation's most comprehensive statewide surveillance system to track infections and deaths from drug-resistant pathogens. Data from death certificates would be used to help compile an annual state report on superbug infections and related deaths. In September, a Reuters investigation revealed that tens of thousands of superbug deaths nationwide go uncounted every year. The infections are often omitted from death certificates, and even when they are recorded, they aren't counted because of the lack of a unified national surveillance system. Because there is no federal surveillance system, monitoring of superbug infections and deaths falls to the states. A Reuters survey of all 50 state health departments and the District of Columbia found that reporting requirements vary widely. Hill's bill would require hospitals and clinical labs to submit an annual summary of antibiotic-resistant infections to the California Department of Health beginning July 1, 2018; amend a law governing death certificates by requiring that doctors specify on death certificates when a superbug was the leading or a contributing cause of death; and require the state Health Department to publish an annual report on resistant infections and deaths, including data culled from death certificates.

Comments

See no problem with this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dead people have much less rights to privacy. While I do have a problem with the surveillance state we live under, I see no problem with disclosing the cause of death that could potentially end many other lives. In any case, this type of disclosure makes much more sense than NSA recording every fucking digital thing we do.

Re:Sorry. Do you not have this????

[PopeRatzo]

I mean seriously? Do you not have a mandated system of reporting super bugs, infectious disease breakouts, and other nasties?

This is the United States of America, and I'm sure there are tons of congressmen who have taken lots of money from the health care industry to block any such regulation. The same congressmen who push laws that investigate women who've had miscarriages because of the possibility that they were really self-induced abortions.

Here in Texas, there's a woman doing 20 years for aborting her own baby. We're a nation governed by savages who wrap themselves in "God's Will". Here in Texas, it's easier to open a gun superstore than it is to open a free clinic for women.