Intensive-Care Patients Need Treatment to Stop Deadly Bug

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-29/intensive-care-patients-need-treatment-to-stop-deadly-bug.html

Disinfecting all intensive-care patients to remove potentially deadly bacteria can prevent infections better than testing for a superbug and targeting only those who carry it, researchers said.

Patients in hospital intensive-care units are particularly vulnerable, weakened so that normally harmless microbes can make them ill and sensitive to acquiring infections from others. Hospitals in the U.S. typically test for bacteria like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus when patients are admitted and isolate those who show signs of harboring it to stop the spread.

The approach doesn’t help the carriers, according to research published in the New England Journal of Medicine that shows it also isn’t ideal for preventing more infections. Instead, bathing every patient with anti-microbial soap and using a topical antibiotic ointment for five days to kill reservoirs in the nose reduced infection rates 44 percent, the study found.

“This is the answer to a long-debated question: Do we target every superbug one by one or try to protect a certain patient group from all disease,” Susan Huang, the lead researcher and associate professor in infectious disease at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, said in a telephone interview. “Targeting high-risk patients seems to be the better way to go. Universal decontamination is the easiest and most effective way to prevent infection.”