Reduction of Nosocomial Infections

Recently saw an article in the “Archives of Internal Medicine” showing an alarming statistic for nosocomial infection. The report indicates 1.7 million hospitalizations contract health care associated infections each year, costing billions of dollars and thousands of deaths.

Nosocomial transmission in hospitals occurs by several routes and some microorganisms may be transmitted by more than one route. The four main transmission routes in hospitals are by contact, droplet, airborne or common vehicle. If we could just reduce a small percentage of these occurrences there could be a huge savings of healthcare cost, suffering and life.

Maybe there is a way to make some headway into reducing these cross infections that are transmitted by airborne droplet nuclei. Millions of dollars of taxpayer’s money has been allocated through government grants to hospitals for the purchase of HEPA air purification to be used in the event of medical emergency. Much of this equipment is in storage awaiting emergency deployment.

Would it not make sense, to take this equipment from storage and strategically deploy it around the health care facilitys thereby reducing the concentrations of airborne infections? This reduction of infectious particles would help patients that have compromised immune systems to resist some of the nosocomial infections. In the event of a pandemic or act of terrorism the equipment could still be redeployed to other locations within the health care facility.