On the last day of school, a friend’s daughter was joyfully jumping on a trampoline when a neighborhood boy double-jumped her and she fell and broke her ankle. Naturally, she was fitted with a cast, but somehow she developed a sore inside the cast that became infected and all but one doctor missed that, as well as the fact that it was spreading throughout her body. Despite a high fever, excruciating pain and other clear symptoms of sepsis, she was misdiagnosed and sent home from two hospitals until her pediatrician finally took a look and sent her straight to the hospital, where she stayed for over a week as they tried to save her leg.
Thankfully it all worked out, and today she is cast-less and (almost) ready for school, in a little less than a month. Despite this, however, she could have died, and it was a sobering lesson for the whole neighborhood.
No one knows exactly where the infection came from – did a doctor somewhere not use sterile instruments? Did he touch the wound with unwashed hands?
The harsh truth is that we’ll never know, but hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) cost the U.S. healthcare system $43 billion a year, affecting two million patients nationwide and killing 100,000 of them.
Timothy Hay reports that it’s long been thought of as a janitorial issue but slowly the medical world has come around to realizing that high-tech gadgets just might be the answer to all the hazardous substances in hospitals, and several small companies are trying to chase Johnson & Johnson out of the arena and be the first to solve the problem.
One company, Xenex Healthcare Services, which offers disinfection services to medical facilities, uses its patented xenon pulse technology to cleanse hospital rooms of germs and bugs and anything else that doesn’t belong there.
In a press release, Xenex states that its systems “have proven to be effective against a variety of the most dangerous super bugs, including Clostridium difficile endospores (C. diff), MRSA, VRE and Acinetobacter. Studies show that the Xenex room disinfection system is consistently 20 times more effective than standard chemical cleaning processes.”
A study at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has found that a device using this type of technology, which pulses xenon ultraviolet light, significantly reduces the number of bacteria - even after the housekeeping staff does its most thorough cleaning possible.
Right before I myself had major surgery five years ago, a friend advised that I bring sterile wipes and clean everything from the TV remote to the handrails on the bed to the sink faucets. Maybe (and hopefully) patients won’t have that added stress in the future.
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Edited by
Allison Boccamazzo
