– I have never seen anything like it in Europe. We expected to find multi-resistant bacteria, but not that bad.

This is what Christian Risbeck, a professor of clinical bacteriology at Lund University in Sweden, said TV4.

Together with colleagues at the university and researchers at the Eucast laboratory in Växjö and in Ukraine, they screened antibiotic-resistant bacteria from patients in Ukrainian hospitals.

He described the results as “terrifying”.

– It gets very bloody too

Antibiotic resistance means that bacteria can continue to live and multiply even if they are exposed to antibiotics. Bacteria that are resistant to two or more antibiotics are called multiresistant FHI.

Hospitals in Ukraine are overwhelmed with wounded soldiers, and Rysback and his colleagues took samples from 131 adults with war wounds, and from eight newborns with pneumonia.

The results show that many of the bacteria they found were multiresistant, and that six percent of the bacteria were resistant to all of the antibiotics tested.

– If bacteria got into the bloodstream and caused sepsis, it could be a death sentence because there are no antibiotics to treat it, says Risbeck.

Worse every hour

They also found that about ten percent of the bacteria were resistant to colistin, an antibiotic used as a last resort if nothing else works.

The patients did not become infected before they were admitted to the hospital, Risbeck says, but that was when they were treated for their infections. Allegedly, this is happening because Ukrainian hospitals are overburdened.

It makes it difficult to isolate infected patients or to close wards if they become infected with dangerous bacteria, says Risbek, who felt sorry for doctors in Ukraine.