Dirty hospitals are spreading superbugs to patients
October 23, 2022
The stakes are too high to settle for the dirty status quo. A hospital patient who contracts a superbug faces a far higher risk of death than another patient with the same medical problem who doesn't get infected.
Hospital rooms, operating rooms and medical equipment are so inadequately cleaned that any patient going into a hospital is at risk of getting a deadly superbug. That's true even if you're going for the happiest reason of all: to give birth.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's latest data shows alarming increases in the most dangerous superbugs: Acinetobacter up 78%, Candida auris up 60% and notorious MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) up 13% year over year.
When you're a patient, which room or bed you're put in largely determines your risk of getting infected. If the previous occupant had an infection, your danger of getting infected with the same organism goes up 583% – almost sixfold, according to Columbia School of Nursing research.
Cleaning is so shoddy that the previous patient's germs are still lurking.
Unlike the COVID virus, which spreads primarily through air, the bacterial and fungal organisms terrorizing hospitals are spread by touch and can last for weeks and months on surfaces. Masks are useless against most superbugs.
In Washington, D.C., politicians and drug companies are pushing legislation, such as the Pasteur Act, that will incentivize companies to invest in new weapons against superbugs. "We're playing with fire if we don't pass" it soon, said Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., one of the bill's sponsors.
Sorry, but that's a long-term strategy. Patients who need hospitalization today, or this year, can't wait for drugs that aren't even in the pipeline yet.
Hospitals should be laser-focused on the strategy that will produce immediate results: rigorous cleaning and disinfection. Yet that is missing from the conversation.
Hospital mattresses are so contaminated with bodily fluids that placing a patient in a bed occupied even 90 days earlier by someone with C. diff (Clostridium difficile, the most common hospital infection) puts the new patient at risk, according to Dr Lucy Witt of Emory University.