Between Dirty Hands and Dirty Surgical Equipment, MRSA, Nosocomical Infection= Effects about 1.7million a Year, killing almost 100,000 a Year and that is just the USA.
Renaissance Europe had birthing centers, places where women went to deliver their babies under the guidance of people with medical training. Even as late as the 1840s, the birthing mortality rate (then calledchildbed fever) sometimes reached 40%. This was because some birthing centers were attached to medical schools, as many are today. Medical universities perform autopsies of cadavers as a part of medical training. The doctors and medical students would interrupt the dissecting of cadavers to deliver babies. While they might wash their hands between dissections and deliveries, they often didn’t change clothes, and disinfectants were unknown at the time. Tiny particles of decaying flesh and germs from the cadavers were taken to the delivery room with terrible results. Birthing centers that operated without research cadavers had lower mortality rates. Men like Semmelweis, Pasteur, and Lister did research in the 1800’s that linked poor medical hygiene to patient mortality rates.
I saw something the other day on the local news where they were talking about MRSA, which later went into dirty hands, dirty surgical equipment, robotics, and Nosocomical Infection. I've been doing further research on this to write a piece on it. The more that I'm reading the angrier and more disgusted i'm getting.
The biggest reason for my disgust is that I just recently lost my Aunt when she went to the hospital for 'Outpatient Surgery' there are several reasons I think she died. At first I thought it was due to them giving her 'Propofol' one of the same drugs that killed Michael Jackson. I of course did a lot of reading and research on 'Propofol' aka as Milk of Amnesia, and read that if a patient has any sort of internal infections, it would be the same as giving her a shot of death, because she did have a UTI which in turn gave her 'Septic Shock', and Phenomena. Which in turn killed her; but after seeing and hearing about the MRSA, nonsocomical infection that opened my eyes as another possible cause for her untimely death.
The only reason I am thinking that was as I said seeing the news cast and talking to my brother about a horrid experience he had at that same hospital in the E.R. He went in because he had hurt his knee and wanted it checked out, like they normally tell you to disrobe and get on the bed, he did neither because his knee hurt so bad and as he was sitting in one of the chairs waiting to be seen. He was looking around of course and saw at the bottom of the bed what appeared to be blood and leakage from a catheter that wasn't properly cleaned up. To say the least he got out of there. All due to lack of cleaning and sanitation. The hospital involved is one of several that has repeat offenses of MERSA, nonsocomical infections and deaths. Knock on wood I've been to both of these hospitals in the past and I've been lucky and thankfully I'm alright and they took incredible care of me and other family and friends that have been there in the past too. ~jlh
| Cellulitis and Abscess Management in the Era of Resistance to Antibiotics (CAMERA) |
Lesser-known C-diff a bigger hospital threat than MRSA? please read entire article, comments too
There's good and bad news on the "superbug" front. In community hospitals in the Southeast, an easily spread bacterium appears to have overtaken the widely feared MRSA as the most common hospital-acquired infection. But a pilot project in Ohio found that pushing hard on simple things such as hand washing and thorough cleaning can lower rates of that bug significantly.
Known as Clostridium difficile, or "C. diff," the bacterium resides in the gut, is spread by contact and can cause painful intestinal infections and in some cases death. It's primarily seen in those over 65, and relapses occur in a fourth of patients, despite treatment.
More than 90% of cases happen after antibiotic use, when the healthy flora of the gut are destroyed and C. diff can take up residence
Dirty Surgical Instruments a Growing Problem in Operating Rooms
NEW YORK -- When John Harrison checked into a Texas hospital in 2009 for rotator cuff surgery, he thought that after a six week recovery period, he'd be as good as new. But two weeks after the operation, the 63 year-old was experiencing severe discomfort and swelling in his shoulder and knew something was terribly wrong.
During an emergency visit to the hospital, doctors told him that he had been infected during surgery with a deadly bacteria called P. aeruginosa. And Harrison wasn't the only one -- six other patients who had undergone surgery at the same hospital had contracted potentially lethal infections as well.
The hospital, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, launched an investigation and closed operating rooms for two weeks.
Surgery was cancelled while they searched for clues and they found some, in something called an arthroscopic shaver. Somehow potentially deadly bacteria had survived the sterilization process and infected Harrison's shoulder.
And the problem isn't isolated. Other investigations in hospitals across the country have revealed the use of other dirty surgical instruments, such as endoscopes used for colonoscopies, have led to infection outbreaks.
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| Trays of medical devices await decontamination after use. With some surgeries now requiring more than 15 trays, hospitals are struggling for space.University of Michigan Health System |
The team in the operating room consists of trained specialists who undergo years of schooling for their respective professions. They have degrees. They are licensed. But the technicians responsible for sterilizing the tools used in procedures are actually not technicians at all.
The departments responsible for cleaning and reassembling surgical instruments -- usually known as "sterile processing" -- are frequently found in hospital basements and sometimes staffed by underpaid hourly laborers.
These workers can be a forgotten and neglected part of the team involved in a surgical procedure. As the CPI report indicates, the sterilization workers say they feel more like they're doing an unrecognized service, with pressure from nurses and surgical staff to make the process as fast as possible.
The faster the instruments make it into the operating rooms, the more patients are moving through the surgical suites. But what may seem like a push for efficiency can backfire, with disastrous consequences.
New Jersey is the only state that requires hospital sterilization workers to undergo training.
Sharon Greene-Golden, head of "sterile processing" at Bon Secours Mary Immaculate Hospital in Virginia, points out that this is a job that must be done by skilled and certified technicians. She thinks of her team as the unseen patient advocates and says, "It is a job that cannot be given to robots because the robot doesn't have the critical thinking to say this is still dirty." At Bon Secours, Greene-Golden has made her sterile processing department state of the art, a model for what should be happening across the country.
New research finds that too often, surgical tools are leaving the basements still contaminated with hidden blood, tissue and other debris from previous surgeries.
In the hospital's sterile supply department used surgical instruments are cleaned, sorted, inspected, and repacked into containers, to be sterilized for the next procedure. Every day, thousands of used instruments pass through sterile supply. This department performs many vital functions for a wide variety of surgical instrument sets. This discussion focuses on sets of handheld surigcal tools, used in almost every procedure. Click here to watch a movie showing sterile supply in action.
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