Israel probes hospital superbug

Hospitals in many countries are facing outbreaks of drug-resistant superbugs

Israeli health officials are investigating a superbug outbreak in some of the country's hospitals that may have killed around 100 patients.

Medical experts are unsure if the antibiotic-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae germ caused the deaths.

The bacteria is harmless to healthy people, doctors say, but can infect people with weakened immune systems.

The bug can lead to diseases such as pneumonia, blood poisoning and soft tissue infections.

The head of the Israeli Society for Infectious Diseases, Itamar Shalit, told Israel Radio that 200 people had been infected with the bug this year and half of them had died.

The patients were already in poor health and had been in hospital for long periods by the time they were infected, said Mr Shalit.

"The bacteria has been in most of the large hospitals in the country," Dr Galia Rahav, an infectious diseases specialist at Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel Aviv told AFP news agency.

Health Minister Yaakov Ben-Izri said hospitals were being cleaned and a quarantine was being put in place to contain the outbreak.