THE National Health Service has ignored a British technique for eliminating dangerous infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile from hospital wards.
A six-month trial — conducted in the US with the co-operation of the Atlanta-based Centres for Disease Control — has just finished and has provided solid evidence that bugs can be killed using a technique developed by Bioquell, of Andover, Hampshire.
The method was successful at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire after it suffered 300 cases of C. difficile infection and a dozen deaths. “We have been trying to set up a trial for the last year in the UK and got nowhere,” said Nick Adams, Bioquell’s chief executive, yesterday. “In the US it took three months to launch the trial and the results were so good we were asked to stay on.”
Bioquell’s technique is to empty wards of patients, seal doors and windows and install Dalek-like machines that pump out a mist of hydrogen peroxide, a powerful oxidising agent. When the mist passes the dew point, a near-invisible film is deposited on all surfaces. It kills bacteria without damaging materials. The agent degrades into water and oxygen, so requires no cleaning up. In a few hours the ward is clean and ready for patients to move back in.
This sounds like a very promising technique. If your hospital is anything like mine, there are plenty of patients on contact isolation, and it's a real chore for everyone to take care of them observing the proper precautions. If we could cut down on the infections there could be a lot of cost savings. I'm just not sure where we put the patients while we're "cleaning house."
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