The government will start to classify hepatitis C and two other bacteria-resistant infections as “Group 3 Infectious Diseases” beginning Saturday, under its recent amendment to the Infectious Disease Control and Prevention Act.
According to the Ministry of Health and Welfare Friday, the new measure calls for doctors to immediately report to the director of a public health clinic after they diagnose a patient with hepatitis C, Vancomycin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (VRSA) or Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE).
The ministry pointed out that the public has been at risk for hepatitis C since the end of 2015 when some clinics recycled disposable syringes for medical treatments. The country currently has an insufficient monitoring system that designates only 186 hospitals as subject to constant surveillance, making it difficult for health authorities to detect hepatitis C outbreaks in hospitals outside of the selected ones, the ministry said.
The Group 3 infectious diseases require “continuous surveillance and the formulation of control measures against the outbreak thereof as they may prevail intermittently,” according to the medical act. “Once physicians, including Chinese medicine doctors, report a Group 3 disease to a public health director, the health center should conduct a case study, and if an actual case is suspected, the health authorities will then carry out an immediate epidemiological investigation,” a ministry official said.
The ministry has made various other efforts to cope with the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) diseases, both here and abroad. In August 2016, the country established and announced national antibiotic resistance management measures to last till 2020, and strengthened the monitoring system of resistant bacteria.
Meanwhile, the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) will revise the "Guideline for the Prevention of Medical Infections Standard" for the first time in 12 years, and distribute it this month to prevent and manage medical-related infections at their onset.
KCDC also plans to strengthen medical infection control and the antibiotic resistance prevention system by establishing the Medical Infection Control Department, in an organizational restructuring, which went into effect on May 8.