I’m at ECCMID in Amsterdam currently listening to a nice report of an OXA-48 Klebsiella pneumoniae outbreak in Gran Canaria in which sinks were found to be contaminated and replaced. Earlier today I listened to a nice paper on how sinks that drain slowly are more likely to contaminate the local environment for up to 1 metre from Paz Aranega Bou who, together with Ginny Moore and other colleagues has published this nice paper . So many papers on sinks now and I do wonder if we have lost sight of what they do and what they really are.
Author: Martin Kiernan (@emrsa15)
The Trojan Horse
I’ve been mulling over the issue of sinks in clinical areas a lot recently and a paper published today in the Journal of Hospital Infection has really crystallised my thoughts. Sinks are everywhere; often extra ones are installed in the quest for high hand hygiene compliance however are we really thinking about the risks that these may cause apart from the traditional ones posed by Pseudomonas and Legionella? Do we even really reflect upon what they are used for? Continue reading
HAP: In the ‘too difficult box’?
I’ve had an enjoyable time at ICPIC. Sessions (abstracts here) have been great, speakers excellent, meeting well-organised but one session rattled my cage. Point prevalence surveys (PPS) and their value was an interesting session, however at the end of it I was wondering whether this was ‘Surveillance in action’ or ‘Surveillance inaction’. Continue reading
Water, water everywhere (or nowhere?)
A new paper by Hopman and colleagues (Andreas is also another author but is being modest) has evaluated the effect of removing sinks from the ICU. The trigger for this intervention was an outbreak caused by an ESBL-Enterobacter that could be related to contaminated sinks. The study looked at what happens if you remove all water sources from the ICU, and all water-related activities were migrated to a tap water-free solution. Continue reading
The Big C
I’ve blogged before about compliance. It’s a big thing for me. If I had a pound (actually after the last week, if I had a dollar) for every time that I think I’ve implemented some intervention to find after a while that it has not been embedded I’d be on a yacht in the Med. But I’m not, instead I’m reading the very nice meta-analysis of the effectiveness of bundles in preventing CLABSI recently published in the Lancet ID. Ok, so the conclusion is that bundles work, but it’s not that which interested me, as a glance at the figures made me consider whether we should move on from effectiveness to implementation. Continue reading
Friday Afternoon: ATP vs UV vs eyeball Vs K9 and Going Commando in Surgery
Well I was looking for a Friday afternoon sort of post and you know when you wait a while and two come at once?.. So firstly, some may recall that I have previously highlighted the utility of a sensitive nose in detecting a variety of things in a previous post. In a study just posted online first in the Journal of Hospital Infection, a springer spaniel was trained to detect C. difficile in the environment with a fair degree of success, especially for detecting rooms in which C. difficile was not present. Continue reading
Dogs can be useful – Woof of concept obtained
I’m not a dog lover. Far from it in fact, however a new paper in the Journal of Hospital Infection caught my eye today. Yesterday I was sitting in the Longitude Prize Advisory 
Committee meeting bemoaning the lack of ‘left field’ ideas coming forward. Harrison himself, winner of the original prize was such a person. He came at the problem of solving the longitude issue from a completely different direction when all of the respected science at the time was convinced that astrology was the answer. Problem: cloud, and not much of a silver lining. So we are looking for a new way to diagnose infection rapidly, distinguishing between those caused by viruses and bacteria in the hope of turning the increasing tide of resistance. So what does Fido (or Nimbus in this case) have to do with this?
SSI – It’s not what you do, but the way that you do it?
Another of my favourite guitarists succumbed to sepsis following surgery just before Xmas, with the sad passing of Rick Parfitt following shoulder surgery, spookily the day after his band Status quo performed their final electric gig (which I was at). The other was Rory Gallagher, who died a few years ago now of MRSA. Surgical procedures are normally carried out under what should be the most controllable of conditions, yet there are variations in practice, a paucity of quality studies on even the most basic of interventions (such as pre-op bathing) and even when there is good evidence, it is ignored. However I do also wonder if we have been missing something. A paper that suggests no difference between Chlorhexidine (CHG) and Povidone Iodine (PI) for pre-surgical skin prep (both aqueous) recently piqued my interest. It was an RCT (non-blinded) undertaken in clean-contaminated upper gastrointestinal or hepatobiliary–pancreatic open surgery, however that wasn’t the aspect that I became interested in. Continue reading
Back to the floor..
A little while ago I blogged about the excellent study from Nottingham that demonstrated significant VRE and MRSA contamination on socks used to prevent falls in the hospitalised elderly. This has been followed by another paper suggesting that shoe coverings undurprisingly become contaminated. So, what? How does this really impact on transmission? A new study from Curtis Donskey’s group has looked at hand contamination in patients directly relating to floor contamination. Continue reading
Something’s afoot..
Working on the principle that what goes up must come down is logical and I was interested to see the result of a small investigation into non-slip socks, currently in vogue for reducing harm due to falls. Nik Mahida and Tim Boswell collected socks from seven wards over two hospitals, collecting 54 pairs and sampling them the same day. The results were interesting. Continue reading
Reflections on Infection Prevention and Control 