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I shouldn't be surprised, but I was

Medical staff need special training to learn to use alcohol hand disinfectants properly. Who knew?

There was an alarming story in the WSJ this morning about antibiotic resistant super bugs (Henry Masur, President of Infectious Diseases Society of America). He said that annually nearly 2 million U.S. patients acquire infections in the hospital and nearly 1 in 10 die, and more than 70% of those infections are resistant to at least one of the drugs used to treat them. We have so over regulated big pharm and the market is so limited, that research on new antibiotics is stalled. In the past 15 years FDA has approved approximately the same number of new antiviral medications that target HIV as it has antibiotics to treat all bacterial infections combined. Yet, thousands and thousands die of resistant strains of bacteria. It's market forces and length of time to get approved. Many, many people with HIV, but limited number in the groups affected by all the different bacteria. Also, there is no political lobby or Hollywood movie stars putting on benefits for the rest of us who develop a raging infection in the hospital.

We're losing more people to this than to HIV. What good will it do the gay guy if you save him from his past only to have him die of a bug that's resistant to antibiotics?

Anyway, back to the hand rubs. I searched Medline for "antibiotics AND resistance" and got something like 35,000 hits, so I reentered the search adding hospitals, and eventually I found this little gem: "Introducing alcohol-based hand rub for hand hygiene: the critical need for training." Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2007; 28(1):50-4.

RESULTS: At baseline, only 31% of Health Care Workers (HCW) used proper technique, yielding a low reducation factor (RF) of 1.4 log(10) colony-forming units (cfu) bacterial count. Training improved HCW compliance to 74% and increased the RF to 2.2 log(10) cfu bacterial count, an increase of almost 50% (P<.001). Several factors, such as applying the proper amount of hand rub, were significantly associated with the increased RF. CONCLUSION: These results demonstrate that education on the proper technique for using hand rub, as outlined in European Norm 1500 (EN 1500), can significantly increase the degree of bacterial killing.

Well, what do you know! Makes me think of kindergarten when we were taught how to wash our hands. Is that still taught in public schools?

Bad bugs need drugs campaign