Verona hospital killer bug 'there for yrs' - Zaia

(ANSA) - VERONA, SEP 2 - A bacterium that killed four newborn girls at a Verona hospital had been there "for months if not years", Veneto Governor Luca Zaia said Wednesday.
    The Citrobacter bug is an opportunistic pathogen that can lead to invasive disease, including infections of the urinary tract, respiratory tract, CNS, skin, and soft tissue.
    "We are faced with a hospital infection with one of the most fearsome bacteria," said Zaia.
    "It may happen in hospitals that there are temporary and circumscribed infections, which then die out, but this is a story that has dragged on for months if not years".
    Zaia said that he had asked the director of the Verona children's hospital, the biggest in Veneto, to "weigh all possible and necessary measures in the way of self-protection, also towards the actors in this affair".
    Meanwhile a protest by one of the dead babies' mothers continued outside the Women and Children's Hospital in the Veneto city.
    "I ask myself why they waited two years to close the hospital," said Francesca Frezza.
    The hospital was reopened Tuesday after a two and a half month operation to get rid of the bug.
    The four girls died last year.
    Frezza added "if they had closed it before they would have averted the deaths and my daughter would be here with me".
    Experts said the killer bacterium had "nested" in the hospital's taps.
    More than 3,000 births take place in the hospital every year.
    (ANSA).