Hospital-Acquired Infections

Although most people remain blissfully unaware of it, a hospital setting is one of the most certain places to pick up circulating germs and bacterial contamination. There once was a time when a large component of operating a hospital included a sizeable cleaning staff, and public and operating areas of hospitals were nicely scrubbed to ensure cleanliness.

In this era of cutbacks there are now fewer people employed to clean hospitals and that, along with ageing infrastructure leaves everyone vulnerable to infections.

Hospital-acquired infections are becoming ever more common, and harder to treat. As with many other types of infections, the use of antibiotics has 'taught' bacteria and germs to change their genetic structures to adapt to these assaults against them, and to survive them. Tuberculosis infection, for example, is becoming harder to treat with new, more virulent strains.

C. difficile is now presenting as the latest threat to public health, as an extremely serious hospital-acquired infection. Various strains of C. difficile are becoming more highly toxic and super-virulent, and despite the vigilance of hospital administrators, their appearance and deadly effects are killing people.

Particularly susceptible are the elderly, those with compromised immune systems, and people suffering the effects of prolonged treatments for diseases that require long hospital stays.

Hospitals now routinely test incoming patients for the presence of C.difficile at admittance to ensure that no one is unknowingly bringing it with them. By the time the results of the test are known, however, most people have already completed their hospital stay and have departed.

Half of the cases of C. difficile identified by hospitals as having been brought in with the patient at admission, or which manifested itself shortly afterward indicate those people were infected before entry to the hospital. Infections can be picked up through exposure at different types of health units, such as clinics or nursing homes.

Not everyone who becomes colonized by the infection will exhibit symptoms of infection; they are carriers.

Germs, moreover, can lodge in fairly inaccessible places, when they're airborne; behind heating ducts, inside sink drains, and in air conditioning units, among other places. A famous hiding place for the germs associated with Legionnaire's Disease, and which strikes people with a plethora of symptoms, including chest pain, coughing up blood, fever, gastrointestinal symptoms, but they typically improve after the first miserable week of infection.

According to the new analyses by those who study the situation, it would seem that those hospitals with fewer bathrooms necessitating that patients share those bathrooms produce a greater risk to circulating and passing on infections. Newer hospitals have been shown to have a lower rate of C. difficile infection than facilities where multiple patients share them.

Long-term patients have on occasion, been known to become infected multiple times with C. difficile, each incident being cleared up with aggressive and successful treatment. It is a dilemma, however, because the threat to human life is dire, since even those who manage to survive the infection can be left with a long struggle to regain their health.

Infections and deaths across Canada from C. difficile have steadily increased since the 1990s when it began to emerge as an ongoing problem. And as the strains become increasingly resistant to treatment they become more deadly than ever.