Could Your Scrubs be Making Your Patients Sick? (530 hits)
July 9, 2010 - The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.7 million health care-associated infections occur every year in hospitals across the United States, and that 99,000 of the patients who become infected will die.
Not only do these infections cost many people their lives, each infection costs the hospital, on average, about $30,000. For these reasons, health care-acquired infections, and their prevention, have the attention of the medical community.
While hand-washing and other sterilizing precautions have received a lot of recent publicity, little attention has been given to the possibility that health care workers’ clothing may be spreading disease from patient to patient.
That, however, is beginning to change...
"When doctors or nurses lean over the beds of patients who are carrying organisms, their clothing can become contaminated. Hours later that bacteria can still be alive and passed on through incidental contact with other patients," noted Gerba in a recent AMA press release.
In fact, the classic physician’s lab coat is so highly suspected of spreading disease that Britain has already made a lab coat with a three-quarter length sleeve their standard.
Because of the likelihood of picking up and passing on germs during the course of a shift, Charles Kinder, M.D., director of the heart rhythm program at Heart Care Centers of Illinois, believes the medical industry needs to invest in bacteria-resistant uniforms.
But lab coats aren’t the only transgressors, according to Charles Gerba, Ph.D., a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona Known as “Dr. Germ” in some circles, Gerba has been focusing his attention on scrub clothing lately.
“We’ve been looking at hospital scrubs—comparing those that were home-laundered with facility-laundered scrubs, new scrubs and with those that were unlaundered after a day of use,” he explained.
“What we found was that the home-laundered scrubs had almost as many bacteria as those that weren’t laundered after having been worn all day. This is probably because at home people aren’t using bleach and are washing in cold, rather than hot, water.”
Gerba’s research also found that 79 percent of unwashed operating room scrubs tested positive for coliform bacteria, E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus and/or other gram- positive cocci...
In order to effectively launder scrubs, lab coats or other work clothes at home, Gerba recommends washing only work clothes together, always using hot water and bleach, and drying for at least 45 minutes. If using a color-safe bleach, increase the recommended amount by 25 percent.
