United States: A new study which shows that patients who leave the hospital might bring home antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” like MRSA. Family members of these patients are 71 times more likely to get a MRSA infection than families without a recent hospital stay.
Increased Risk with Longer Hospital Stays
As reported by HealthDay, the longer the hospital stay, very much higher the risk, even if the patient was never diagnosed with MRSA. According to researcher Aaron Miller, patients can carry MRSA from the hospital and pass it to their family members.
“This suggests hospitals contribute to the spread of MRSA into the community through discharged patients who are asymptomatic carriers,” Miller added.
Understanding MRSA Transmission
Infections of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) don’t respond to common antibiotics, making them difficult to treat, researchers said in background notes. MRSA infections really can be deadly and also if they spread to the blood or the lungs.
MRSA usually spreads in the hospitals and all the health care systems setting but it can also be transmitted in the specific communities and usually through skin to skin to skin connection.
Study Findings and Implications
For the study, researchers analysed a database of insurance claims from 158 million enrollees with two or more family members on the same plan.
The team identified more than 424,000 MRSA cases among roughly 343,000 insured people.
These included more than 4,700 cases of MRSA potentially transmitted to a family member by a recently hospitalized patient who was diagnosed with the superbug.
Preventing MRSA Spread
All the researchers might have found another 8,000 potential transmissions among families involving a recently discharged patient who hadn’t been diagnosed with MRSA.
Having a family member in the hospital and spend some time with him and you’ll probably get MRSA and also the hospitalizations are longer than the 10 days appeared to increase risk of a household MRSA infection by 70 to 80 results.
“This important study illustrates the risk of spread of resistant pathogens related to healthcare and highlights the essential importance of core infection practices,” Dr. Thomas Talbot who is the chief hospital epidemiologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and president of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, said in a journal news release. Talbot was not involved with the research.
“Hand hygiene, environmental cleaning and standard interventions to reduce Staphylococcal colonization are crucial to preventing the spread of resistant bacteria in healthcare settings,” Talbot said.
Although Miller noted that while we identified a significant risk factor for the transmission in the household and the community the absolute risk remains relatively low and it is important to not over-emphasize the hospital stay risk.