[Infections in intensive care medicine]

Severe bacterial, parasitic or viral infections should be treated in an intensive therapy ward. On the other hand, patients in intensive therapy wards are threatened by secondary bacterial infections which are above all evoked by so-called problem germs. In the first place, chemotherapy is based on modern penicilline and/or cephalosporins, mostly in combination with a modern aminoglycoside. Septicaemias are evoked above all by gram-negative bacilli or by Staph. aureus. A special form is the infusion septicaemia by so-called water germs, which in most cases cannot be cultivated at 37 degrees C. Furthermore, the author enters the infections by venous catheter, infections of the urinary tract and infections of the respiratory tract in intensive therapy patients, which up to now are an unsolved problem. This problem cannot be solved, too, by means of essentially improved antibiotics alone. However, it would be useful to renounce for example every unnecessary catheterisation of the urinary bladder. The control of the excretion or aleviations of cure are no arguments for the insertion of a permanent catheter.