CHICAGO – If you think the privacy curtains at your health care facility are free of potentially harmful bacteria, think again.
Within one week of being laundered, 92% of hospital curtains were contaminated with pathogens that included methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus (VRE) species, results from a single-center study showed.
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Dr. Marin L. Schweizer
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"Usually when health care workers walk into a patient room, they’ll wash their hands, grab the curtain, pull it aside, and then touch the patient, without realizing that they touched the curtain," Marin L. Schweizer, Ph.D., said in an interview during a poster session at the annual Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. "The message here is that health care workers should wash their hands after touching privacy curtains and before touching the patient."
Over a period of 3 weeks, Dr. Schweizer and her associates obtained 180 swab cultures from 43 privacy curtains in 30 rooms at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (8 medical intensive care units, 7 surgical ICUs, and 15 medical wards). They obtained the cultures twice weekly from an 800-cm2 area on the leading edge of each curtain, and marked each curtain to determine when it was changed.
Standard microbiologic methods, including broth enrichment, were used to determine contamination. To distinguish persistence of pathogens on curtains from recontamination, all MRSA and VRE were typed using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis.
Of the 13 curtains placed during the study, 12 (92%) demonstrated contamination within 1 week, while 41 of the 45 curtains (95%) demonstrated contamination on at least one occasion. "We thought the prevalence would be high, but we didn’t think it would be that high," commented Dr. Schweizer of the department of general internal medicine at the University of Iowa, Iowa City.
She went on to report that VRE and MRSA were isolated from 42% and 21% of the curtains, respectively. Eight curtains were contaminated with VRE at more than one time point: three with persistence of a single genetic type and five with genetic types over time. "This shows that there are lots of pathogens on the curtains," Dr. Schweizer said. "They stick around for a long time and they’re constantly being recontaminated."
Two-thirds of all swab cultures (66%) were positive for either S. aureus, Enterococcus spp. (44%), or gram-negative rods (22%).
The study was funded by PurThread, a manufacturer of antimicrobial fabrics for use in health care settings. One of the study investigators, Dr. Eli Perenchevich, is a paid consultant for PurThread.
According to Dr. Schweizer, none of the curtains studied were made by PurThread.
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