病床之間的隔簾有致病菌的汙染!!

新吊上去、剛清潔過的病床之間的隔簾，在一星期內就有九成受到各種致病菌的汙染!!

因為各醫院、各病房的致病菌可能不一樣，這也是台灣醫院感管師和細菌室合作，可以做的檢查，自己設計如何採檢、培養，可以寫成報告!

 

Hospital Privacy Curtains Laden With
Germs

By Fran Lowry

(Reuters Health) - The privacy curtains that separate care
spaces in hospitals and clinics are frequently contaminated with potentially
dangerous bacteria, researchers said in Chicago this week.

Because of this, health care providers should make sure to
wash their hands after routine contact with these curtains and before
interacting with patients, Dr. Michael Ohl, from the University of Iowa, Iowa
City, said at the 51st Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and
Chemotherapy (ICAAC).

"There is growing recognition that the hospital
environment plays an important role in the transmission of infections in the
health care setting and it's clear that these (privacy curtains) are
potentially important sites of contamination because they are frequently
touched by patients and providers," Dr. Ohl told Reuters Health.

Health care providers often touch these curtains after they
have washed their hands and then proceed to touch the patient. Further, these
curtains often hang for a long time and are difficult to disinfect.

In their longitudinal study, Dr. Ohl and his team obtained
180 swab cultures from 43 privacy curtains twice a week for three weeks. The
curtains were located in the medical and surgical intensive care units and on a
medical ward of the University of Iowa Hospitals.

The researchers also marked the curtains to keep track of
when they were changed.

Contamination with Staphylococcus aureus,
methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), Enterococcus spp., vancomycin-resistant
enterococcus (VRE), and aerobic gram-negative rods was determined by standard
microbiologic methods, including broth enrichment. In addition, VRE and MRSA
were typed using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) to determine their
exact clonal types. This enabled the researchers to tell whether they were the
same bacteria or a new type of resistant bacteria on the curtains.

The study found that the contamination was significant and
that it occurred very rapidly after new curtains were placed.

Of the 13 privacy curtains that were placed during the
study, 12 (92%) showed contamination
within a week. Virtually all privacy curtains (41; 95%) were contaminated on at
least one occasion.

MRSA was
isolated from 21% of curtains, and VRE from 42%. Eight curtains were contaminated with VRE at more than one
time point, three of these showed persistence of a single isolate type of VRE
and the other five showed contamination with different VRE isolates, which
suggested recontamination with a new type of bacteria.

Overall, 119
swab cultures (66%) were positive for either S. aureus (26%), Enterococcus spp.
(44%), or gram-negative rods (22%).

"The vast
majority of curtains showed contamination with potentially significant bacteria
within a week of first being hung, and many were hanging for longer than
three or four weeks," Dr. Ohl noted.

"We need to think about strategies to reduce the
potential transfer of bacteria from curtains to patients," he added.
"The most intuitive, common sense strategy is to wash hands after pulling
the curtain and before seeing the patient. There are other strategies, such as
more frequent disinfecting, but this would involve more use of disinfectant
chemicals, and then there is the possibility of using microbial resistant
fabrics. But handwashing is by far the most practical, and the cheapest
intervention."

Reuters Health
Information © 2011