Via The Guardian: Bacteria becoming resistant to hospital disinfectants, warn scientists. Excerpt:
Hospitals will need to use new strategies to tackle bacteria experts have warned, after finding a type of hospital superbug is becoming increasingly tolerant of alcohol – the key component of current disinfectant hand rubs.
Handwashes based on alcohols such as isopropanol have become commonplace as a method of infection control. But while the move has been linked to benefits, including a fall in rates of hospital infections of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), new research suggests it might also have had unexpected consequences.
Scientists say they have discovered that superbugs known as vancomycin-resistant enterococci, or VRE, appear to be becoming more tolerant to alcohol.
“This is a wake-up call to infection control hospital teams around the world that if you want to control the emergence of VRE you need to do more than just rely on your alcohol-based disinfectants,” said Prof Timothy Stinear, co-author of the research from the University of Melbourne, noting that these could include improved adherence to current regimens – such as thorough cleaning with alcohol hand rubs – the use of other disinfectants like chlorine-based products, and greater screening of patients for infections.
One of the most common species of VRE is Enterococcus faecium, with infections on the rise in England and Australia. VRE infections, said Stinear, can be serious and sometimes even prove deadly. “The problem with VRE is that it can colonise the gut and then go into patients’ bloodstream and cause sepsis, bloodstream infection, and it is very difficult to get rid of because it is resistant to almost all antibiotics,” he said. Among the problems, Stinear added, is that it can lodge in heart valves and prosthetic device implants.
“It only impacts the most susceptible people – so healthy people do not get VRE infections,” Stinear said, noting that people receiving chemotherapy, organ transplants or who undergo dialysis are among those at risk.
Writing in the journal Science Translational Medicine, Stinear and colleagues report how they took Enterococcus faecium bacteria recovered from patients – so-called “isolates” – and exposed these in the lab to an isopropanol-based solution for five minutes. In total 139 such samples were used, collected from two hospitals in Melbourne between 1997 and 2015. Alcohol-based handrubs were systematically introduced in Australia from the early 2000s, with the volume used increasing tenfold by 2015.
The results reveal that Enterococcus faecium bacteria have become more tolerant to alcohol over that time.
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