Antibiotics Linked With Hospital Bed Infections

Scientists have raised the alarm over the spread of hospital bed infection, saying when a hospital patient is taking antibiotics, the next person to use the same bed may face an elevated risk of infection with the dangerous germ Clostridium difficile.

To this end, doctors have suggested the need to improve sterilisation procedures in hospitals, a measure to reduce the spread of infections in hospital environment.

This is the finding of a new report published online in the journal ‘JAMA Internal Medicine’.

According to a Professor of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City, Dr. Marc Siegel, “This underscores the idea that hospitals are not being sanitised enough or they can’t be sanitised enough.

There is an increased need for increased sterilisation procedures between patients.” C. difficile, a bacterium that causes inflammation of the colon and causes life-threatening diarrhoea, is found in United States, U.S. hospitals.

Scientists have known that antibiotic use can contribute to the germ’s spread, but a new report has shown that it is not just the patient taking the medication who’s at risk. According to findings in the study, because the germ spores can persist, patients later assigned to the same hospital bed may have increased odds of getting C. difficile.

Lead Researcher, Dr. Daniel Freedberg, a gastroenterologist at Columbia University Medical Centre in New York City, said: “This study provides evidence that there is a herd effect with antibiotics. “In other words, antibiotics have the potential to affect the health of people who don’t themselves receive antibiotics.”

According to the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, C. difficile causes nearly half a million infections a year in the United States and 29,000 deaths. Older adults are most at risk.

In this study, researchers found that if the previous patient in the hospital bed was given antibiotics (not for C. difficile), the odds of C. difficile infection in the next patient were nearly one per cent, compared with less than half of one per cent if no antibiotics were given, the webMD reported.

“Antibiotics encourage the spread of C. difficile from patients who asymptomatically carry C. difficile to patients who are C. difficile-free, even if the C. difficile-free patients do not receive any antibiotics,” Freedberg said.