Due to poor cleaning of hospital rooms, operating rooms and medical equipment, any patient admitted to hospital is at risk of contracting a deadly superbug. That’s true even if you’re giving birth, which is the reason you’re happiest.
The latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show an alarming rise in the most dangerous superbugs. Acinetobacter increased by 78%, Candida auris increased by 60%, and the infamous MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) increased by 13% year-on-year.
If you are a patient, the room or bed you are put in largely determines your risk of getting infected. 583% increased risk of contracting the same organism if the previous resident was infected — almost 6 timesaccording to a Columbia School of Nursing study.
The cleaning is too sloppy, and the previous patient’s germs are still lurking.
Unlike the COVID virus, which spreads primarily through the air, the bacterial and fungal organisms terrorizing hospitals are spread by contact and can persist for weeks to months on surfaces. Masks are useless against most superbugs.
In Washington, D.C., politicians and pharmaceutical companies are pushing laws like the Pasteur Act, which encourage companies to invest in new weapons against superbugs. Sen. Todd Young (R., Indiana), one of his sponsors of the bill, said, “If it doesn’t pass, you’re playing with fire.”
Sorry, it’s a long term strategy. Patients who need hospitalization today, or this year, can’t wait for drugs that aren’t yet in the pipeline.
Hospitals should focus on strategies that yield immediate results: rigorous cleaning and disinfection. But it’s missing from the conversation.
Hospital mattresses are so contaminated with bodily fluids that patients with C. diff (Clostridium difficile, the most common nosocomial infection) are placed in beds occupied 90 days earlier. place a new patient Dr. Lucy Witt of Emory University found it in danger.
Even the fragile newborn is at risk. A staggering 20% of surfaces in the neonatal intensive care unit at Chattanooga Children’s Hospital Contaminated in drug-resistant MRSA, according to researchers at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.
Dirty medical equipment is another cause. researchers who tracked An infection occurred from contaminated ECG wires in the burn ward of a hospital in Galveston, Texas. The last patient treated with that wire was discharged 38 days ago, but the Superbug was alive.
These are not anecdotes. Hospitals are full of germs. A survey of 23 academic medical centers from Washington, DC to north Boston by epidemiologists Michael Parry and Philip Carlin found that Overlooked Hospital Cleaner Over half of the surface that is to be cleaned. (Tip: If you have to eat lunch in a hospital room, the safest place to put your sandwich is the toilet seat, and it’s seldom overlooked.)
The good news is that cleaning reduces infection rates.Researcher at Rush Medical School in Chicago reduced the spread By instructing cleaning staff on which surfaces they’re spraying and the importance of waiting for surfaces to get wet, instead of quickly wiping with a spray, we’ve reduced superbugs by two-thirds.
Parry at Stanford Hospital in Connecticut, improved cleaning Contributing to a “dramatic reduction” of infections, C. diff.
Mayo Clinic Robert Orenstein Reduced C. diff In a pilot program, wiping surfaces around a patient’s bed with bleach once a day resulted in an 85% improvement. Why aren’t any hospitals doing this?
It’s too risky to be satisfied with the dirty status quo.Hospitalized patients infected with superbugs face afar high risk of death than another patient with the same medical problem who was not infected.
two Johns Hopkins University physicians, Cynthia Sears and Faiza Yusuf Sheikh, warn Despite hopes for ‘major progress’ against cancer in the next few years, many cancer patients will still die ‘without similar strenuous efforts to defeat the superbug’ I guess.
Eliminating superbugs starts with hospital cleaning. On the other hand, when visiting loved ones in the hospital, bring bleach wipes and clean surfaces near their beds.
Betsy McCohy Chairman of the Commission to Reduce Infectious Deaths.
