A recent issue of US Today featured an extensive article on a new disease about which few people are aware (see link). It is particularly dangerous as it has no cure. No drug or antibiotic is effective against it. Even the “drugs of last resort” can’t stop it. It is called CRE, and it has spread to at least 42 states in the USA. As the article makes clear, the most likely place to catch CRE is at a hospital, nursing home or some kind of health-care facility. It reports that organ transplant and chemotherapy locations are especially at risk.
A map that was in the print version of the article shows that CRE was first reported in North Carolina. The map reports that only Alaska, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine and Vermont have not yet reported cases of CRE, although it is feared that “many cases still go unrecognized…” and that “only a handful of states” track data on the disease even though the CDC has urged states to do so. CRE is especially dangerous as “Death rates among patients with CRE infections can be about 40%…” The article reports that the disease is reported to be “endemic” in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles, with lesser outbreaks elsewhere. It is also reported that surveys in the Chicago region have identified 3% of patients in ICUs as carrying the disease and found that up to “30% of patients in long-term care facilities” had the infection as well. Many patients are not symptomatic even though they carry the disease.
Doctors have also reported that CRE is now spreading its drug-resistance genes to other strains of similar bacteria. The “big fear” is that CRE will eventually spread to more common strains of bacteria and that it could, in the future, be spread “through something as simple as a handshake.” You need to be aware of this new disease.
Matthew 24:7 and Revelation 6:8 (RSV) both prophesy that pestilences (plagues or disease epidemics) will become more common in the latter days of this age just prior to Jesus Christ’s return, and that many people will die from these pestilences. Will CRE develop into just such a plague? We do not know. Health care facilities are trying very hard to stop its spread and one doctor in Brooklyn, New York is cited as saying “You need extreme control measures” to guard against CRE being “continually reintroduced” into hospitals and health-care facilities.
For the full story on CRE, please read the link below. For an in-depth examination of the prophesied trends and events that will identify that the biblically-prophesied “latter days” have arrived on the earth, I invite you to read my article Are We Living in the Biblical “Latter Days?”
