Toronto, May 4, 2000 - Health care practitioners who battle superbugs, flesh eating disease, chicken pox and the flu have a new tool to support them in the fight for good health.

Mount Sinai Hospital's microbiology department has launched a new web site for health care professionals to provide quick access to information that will aid in the prevention, diagnosis, treatment and surveillance of infectious diseases.

http://microbiology.mtsinai.on.ca is the first web site in Canada to track and present information on the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. "We work as a coordinating centre for collaborative research networks. This is a time efficient way of working with professionals to make the information available," says Dr. Don Low, microbiologist-in-chief for Mount Sinai Hospital and the University Health Network.

The site is home to data from the Canadian Bacterial Surveillance Network, the Ontario Group A Streptococcal Study and the Toronto Invasive Bacterial Disease Network. These networks are comprised of centres from across Canada that voluntarily provide data and bacterial samples for epidemiological and microbiological study, to improve the prevention and management of serious infections, especially those related to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.

For the Canadian Bacterial Surveillance Network (CBSN), Mount Sinai Hospital analyzes isolates from its network of hospitals and labs and catalogues the isolates that can then be used for further research. This allows the CBSN to act as an early warning system and enables researchers to investigate the specific physical and biochemical traits of particularly menacing strains.

It was information from the CBSN's database that led to a ground breaking study published last July in the New England Journal of Medicine. A Mount Sinai research team led by Dr. Low determined that antibiotic resistance in Canada was growing against the newest class of antibiotics, the fluoroquinolones.

"This important find was the result of having the CBSN database and test samples. It allowed us to find something no one else had found before," Dr. Low says. "This gave us the opportunity to alert the health care community about the threat of antibiotic resistance to this class of drugs."

The web site also provides valuable information to clinicians and health care workers on the following items: procedures, protocols and guidelines for antibiotic use and the prevention and treatment of antibiotic resistance; news, events and journal articles on the study of infectious diseases; fact sheets on a variety of infectious diseases, outlining symptoms, methods of transmission and treatment options; and management protocols for health care workers who may have come into contact with such infectious diseases as HIV.

For members of the public seeking information there is a General Interest Section that provides fact sheets and a question and answer section on diseases including the flu, chicken pox and Group A strep.

The web site was almost two years in the making, developed by Karen Green, an infection control practitioner and research associate at Mount Sinai Hospital. The site was made possible by a generous educational grant awarded by Pfizer Canada.

"Pfizer Canada is pleased to support both the Canadian Bacterial Surveillance Network and the Mount Sinai microbiology web site which will make information on infectious diseases and their treatment easily accessible to the scientific community," said Dr. Pierre Roland, Vice President and Medical Director of Pfizer Canada. "Collecting solid information on resistance and ensuring it is widely available is part of our commitment to address antibiotic resistance on many levels and ensure antibiotics remain valuable and useful tools in our fight against infectious diseases."

For more information contact:

Rob Andrusevich
Media Relations Officer
Mount Sinai Hospital
(416) 586-3161