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StaphAseptic™ News
Antiseptic baths help fight 'superbug' infections
March 16, 2010
Reuters
By Anne Harding
Trauma patients are particularly vulnerable to hospital-acquired infections, Dr. Heather L. Evans of Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, one of the study's authors, told Reuters Health.
"Many of these patients will go directly to the operating room and maybe not get the best preoperative cleansing, just because the circumstances are such that they need an immediate operation," she explained.
Researchers had previously shown that bathing medical intensive care unit (ICU) patients with cloths containing the antiseptic chlorhexidine gluconate reduced infections with two types of drug-resistant bacteria, Evans and her team note in their report in the Archives of Surgery.
To investigate whether the cloths would be helpful for trauma ICU patients as well, the researchers used antiseptic-free disposable cloths to bathe these patients daily for six months, and then used the antiseptic cloths for another six months.
Antiseptic bathing cut the likelihood that patients would develop catheter-related bloodstream infections, as well as the risk of ventilator-associated pneumonia caused by methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA, popularly known as a "superbug"). Such superbugs kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and 19,000 in the United States.
This is a portion of the original article. To keep reading, visit Reuters.com
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