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23 Comments
- RadiantBeing, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Does anyone know why they don't design hospital rooms so that they can be disinfected and sprayed down with a hose between occupants? The other day I was reading about an early 20th century sanitorium that actually fumigated its rooms with formalin to prepare them for new patients.
- Thud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8"Probably because that would affect profits too much."
What the hell? If you ever actually get around to clicking the link to the article, you'll see that it states that hospitals lose a lot of money when patients get these kinds of preventable infections.... so it seems like it would be a smart investment to disinfect the rooms.
"A study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Medical Quality found hospitals lost $US27,000 ($A35,000) for each patient who gets a preventable infection there." - 47f0, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9I recently had the pleasure of visiting a friend at a local hospital. I was genuinely impressed by the security measures. To visit my friend, I had to pass through a metal detector. The contents of my backpack were inspected. When the metal detector went off, I was scanned by a high-tech hand detector. Again, very impressive. Did all of that make me feel secure? In a word, no. I did not feel secure because my friend was sick - very sick. He had picked up a drug-resistant staph infection on a previous visit, and was in danger of losing his hand.
According to a recent news story, the CDC estimates that 90,000 Americans will die this year as a direct result of their visit to the hospital. They will not die as a result of terrorism, deranged junkies seeking drugs, or other acts of lunacy. They will die from infections - largely preventable, hospital-acquired infections.
In the post-9/11 culture, we have turned our national radar on the madman, the fanatic intent on harming us. Yet the most devastating attack of that kind to date killed a little over 3,000 people. Balance that on your mental scales against the 90,000 who will die from hospital-acquired infections this year, last year, and next year, and consider where the real threat is. Each of those people is just as American as the 9/11 victims. And each is just as dead.
When an an otherwise healthy woman can enter the hospital, give birth, and be discharged minus her arms and legs, lost to infection, (which happened at the same hospital I was visiting) something is wrong. If our hospitals really want to secure their facilities, if they are serious about protecting us from danger, they will trade in their metal detectors for barrels of disenfectant, train their staff obsessively on hygiene, and put their security teams to work scrubbing the facility.
If we're serious about the value of American lives, this is a battle we need to get serious about - or we can continue to listen to the hysterical drum-beat of our political leaders telling us where the danger... isn't. - AgentEntropy, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Probably because that would affect profits too much.
- sdwilly, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I can honestly say I've never been to a hospital that required I be scanned by a metal detector..
- crankycoder, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7@Phil246
"You have to be careful with antibiotics. If you overuse them, it becomes more likely that a resistant strain will appear ( evolution in action :P )"
This is a common fallacy that people frequently misunderstand. If you use antibiotics but do not complete the prescribed drugs, you can't be sure that you've actually killed all the bacteria. When people stop using their drugs "once they feel better" - say at 5 days instead of the 10 day course of drugs, not all the pathogens may have been killed off. *This* is what leads to super bugs. - Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7You have to be careful with antibiotics. If you overuse them, it becomes more likely that a resistant strain will appear ( evolution in action :P ) , forcing you to use a more powerful antibiotic.
Eventually you get a strain which immune to most - And at that point you are in trouble.
Steps like these help cut down on the problem but they will not eliminate it, neither will careful use of antibiotics alone for that matter.
It seems like its going to become more of a cat and mouse game between new methods of killing bacteria and viruses, and resistant strains that appear.
There are some areas which may (*MAY*) be harder for strains to develop resistance against. Something along the lines of physical damage done to the bacteria/virus - But that would require smart nanotechnology. The other is possibly radiological - but this has the added problem of 'collateral damage' - hiPpymIck, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4what about the overuse of antibiotics in intensive farming.......
http://www.themeatrix.com/
with implications for human health - captinherb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4While that can lead to super bugs so can the over prescription of antibiotics. They are routinely prescribed for virus related infections, despite the fact they have not affect on viruses, because the patient insists the doctor give them something and the doctor complies.
- Odjn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Yeah this shouldn't be happening.
- Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3not necessarily. It could be one cause certainly but definately not the only one.
mutations in the bacteria is a known cause - Something that happens during the antibiotic course regardless of if they complete it or not.
http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk/millhillessays/2001/superbugs.htm may be an interesting read for you - dracostimpy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Behold the miracle cure for superbugs:
http://www.nanotechnology.com/blogs/steveedwards/2005/12/silver-once-and-future-antimicrobial.html - Phearce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I had the misfortune of contracting a MRSA ("super-bug") infection during 3/2006. I ended up spending a week in the hospital on heavy antibiotics and had to have surgery to remove part of my thigh. I'm in good health, active, and carry no "risks." My doctor said these kinds of infections are increasingly common and referred to them as "community acquired," meaning you get them simply through day-to-day life.
At first the hospital was super-careful with me, and staff washed their hands every time they left the room. After about 24 hours, they got much more lax and only about 1/3 of them cleaned up properly. Their attitude seamed to be defeatist. Something like "it's too late now -- it has already spread to everybody".
IMHO, the solution is simple: wash your hands before and after touching any wound. Clean all wounds (even minor ones -- mine was originally an in-grown hair!) as if they are infected. - sideshowRAHEEM, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"US hospitals boost effort to kill super bugs"
-Quick some tell Spiderman to watch his ass! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2People do not understand how the cost system and billing in hospitals work. What a hospital wants is a lot of non-complicated patients that stay for as little time as possible.
A really sick patient requires long bed times, a lot of medical test and consultants etc. All insurance systems and especiallu medicare/medicaid will pay set amounts as 'packages' so if a patient is being treated for an infection, they will pay $1000 a day for all test and room stay. If the total cost is higher, say $1200 the hospital loses money.
A lot of the high cost actually helps subsidize the sickest patients. The greatest cost and loss to a hospital are the really sick intubated, comatose ICU patients. - Yez70, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't know how they lose money treating infections.
When my father in law got an infection in the hospital, which they admitted he got there, they happily charged his two insurance companies for the costs related to treating the infection. Blue Cross and Medicare both paid the full bills too. - 47f0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I, too was startled - apparently it's a concept called "multi-security" - as rated by one of the practitioners of this idiocy in my area:
http://obesityhelp.com/morbidobesity/bariatric+hospital+detail+Ocala+Regional+Medical+Center+cg.html
Stay tuned - it's coming to your neighborhood. I looked up the brand name of the detectors they were using, and yes, they are marketed to hospitals:
http://www.rapiscansystems.com/metaldetection.html - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Most rooms are cleaned pretty meticulously. However the primary spread of hospital acquired infections continue to be poor hand washing. There's no excuse and many many hospitals are working on getting hand washing to be done.
- Haohmaru, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@RadiantBeing
Well, unless you achieve 100% disinfection 100% of the time (which is unlikely), you're just making the problem worse.
I worry more about the handle bars on shopping carts and knobs on public bathroom doors. - Haohmaru, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The discussions here about the human misuse of antibiotics is kinda moot.
Whether or not you use them properly, they're already grossly misused on animals, most of which makes it into what we eat.
Even if it never develops into the "timebomb" some scientists warn us about, I think the 10's of thousands of deaths and growing should already be unacceptable. Look how AIDs has become so "common" to many, despite millions of deaths. - saifatlast, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It would probably be extremely expensive to build and operate something like that, and a lot of research would have to be done to prove that it's even working. Plus, as soon as someone walks in, the room is infected again.
- NanoStuff, on 10/12/2007, -5/+2"Eventually you get a strain which immune to most - And at that point you are in trouble."
This is what happens when you over-use anti-biotics, http://www.craphound.com/images/giantpillbug.jpg
Try getting that out of your circulatory system. - dagonweb, on 10/12/2007, -12/+2Ahh, I see the third world is slowly catching up with Europe.
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