Are vancomycin-resistant enterococci a problem in Polish hospitals?

Vancomycin-resistant enterococci are responsible for a significant percentage of hospital-acquired infections in the world. They can easily spread from patient to patient in the hospital environment, usually via the hands of medical staff. The infection most often develops in at-risk patients and poses an enormous epidemiological, as well as therapeutic, problem. In Poland, vancomycin-resistant enterococci are considered to be bacterial alert pathogens, currently viewed as particularly dangerous to public health. Until now, eight phenotypes of acquired vancomycin resistance have been described, but the most important clinically are VanA and VanB phenotypes because of their incidence and the speed of phenotype acquisition between enterococcal cells. VRE strains isolated in Poland belong to the clonal complex CC17, which is widespread in Europe and worldwide. First VanA VRE strains were described in 1996 in Gdansk. The first isolate of VanB VRE phenotype was isolated in 1999 from a patient undergoing long-term therapy with vancomycin and hospitalized in the intensive care unit of one of Warsaw's hospitals. The latest European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network report places Poland among countries with a proportion of resistant strains at 10 to < 25%, along with Germany, Portugal, England, Greece, Romania and Latvia.