This is an audio cast of the frontline segment Outbreak at NIH.

Broadcast October 14th on PBS.

The correspondent is David Hoffman.

The NIH thought they had stopped a deadly antibiotic resistance superbuck until it turned up in patient 19.

I remember the doctor saying we'd discovered TriHouse KPC and said we're going to move him to the isolation unit.

This is a pretty serious infection. This is one of those superbugs.

Outbreak at NIH begins right now.

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No where is the threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria more urgent than in hospitals, with their heavy reliance on antibiotics and their population of vulnerable patients.

There have been problems in hospitals around the country, and over the past decade, hospitals in the New York City area have become the epicenter of a particularly resistant and deadly superbuck.

It's called KPC. It lives in the digestive system and can spread its resistance to other bacteria.

And patients who get it in one hospital can carry the bacteria to other hospitals.

That happened in a story we first told in 2013, when one of the nation's most prestigious hospitals, the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, found itself battling a major KPC outbreak.

It began in the summer of 2011, when a patient with a rare lung disease was transferred from a New York City hospital to be treated at the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

She was carrying KPC. It was the first case of it the NIH had ever seen.

Deputy Director, Dr. David Henderson.

We immediately went on high alert, the equivalent of hospital epidemiology, DEF CON-5, tried to implement as many things as we could think of at the time to prevent any further spread of the organism in the hospital.

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