BEIJING, June 7 -- A new hospital superbug has caused 12 deaths at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, in Buckinghamshire, and an infection expert has resigned over hospital's failure to control.

Health officials are closely monitoring a new strain of hospital infection.

    As revealed in The Independent yesterday, the bug, a virulent new strain of Clostridium difficile, which causes severe diarrhoea and can be life-threatening, has resisted all attempts to control it since the outbreak began 18 months ago.

    Stoke Mandeville Hospital, a national centre for spinal injury, has had 300 cases of Clostridium difficile in 18 months. There have been 12 deaths in which the infection has been described as an "actual or probable" cause.

    The bug is more dangerous to elderly people and the average age of the patients who died was 85.

    Paul Gillett, a consultant microbiologist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, has resigned after what colleagues said was a long struggle to get the problem of hospital infections taken seriously.

    Two years ago, Dr Gillett is understood to have established an isolation ward at the hospital to treat patients with hospital- acquired infections, but it was closed by managers because of a shortage of nurses.

    Managers in the hospital were accused of failing to inform staff about the outbreak of the new bug. An in-house publication called The Bug Buster, circulated to hospital staff at Stoke Mandeville, failed to highlight the new strain of C. difficile.

    Cases of the infection, which is treated with antibiotics, have risen in recent years. Cases have soared from fewer than 1,000 in 1990 to 43,672 in 2004. Latest figures show there were 934 deaths in 2003, a 38 per cent rise in two years.

    The new strain of the infection is more virulent and harder to destroy than existing strains. Scientists at the Health Protection Agency are now working to see if the virulent strain of the bacterial infection is C. difficile 027, which has spread in many American hospitals since 2001, and killed more than 100 patients in Quebec, Canada, last year.

(Agencies)