- Some of the bacteria could be drug-resistant, meaning each time you enter a hospital you’re exposed to potentially lethal infections.
- They found that the white lab coats worn by clinicians, their mobile phones, the stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, and thermometers are all teeming with germs.
Image: BBC
You may think of hospitals as places you go to get well. However, they can also be one of the most dangerous places you could be.
A survey of several level 4, 5 and 6 hospitals in Kenya has found they are all teeming with bacteria—10,000 times above any acceptable level.
Some of the bacteria could be drug-resistant, meaning each time you enter a hospital you’re exposed to potentially lethal infections.
A study by researchers from the Kenya Medical Research Institute and the US Army Medical Research Directorate-Africa says the dangerous these bacteria are where you may least expect them.
They found that the white lab coats worn by clinicians, their mobile phones, the stethoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, and thermometers are all teeming with germs as they are poorly sanitised.
The researchers now say hundreds of Kenyans are getting sick with hospital-acquired infections.
“In Kenya, the rate of healthcare-associated infections are estimated to be 4.4 per 100-patient admission,” they say in a study published last week in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.
It is titled 'Ten Thousand-Fold Higher than Acceptable Bacterial Loads Detected in Kenyan Hospital Environments: Targeted Approaches to Reduce Contamination Levels'.
They sampled five hospitals, which they described but did not name. One is a 450-bed national referral and teaching hospital offering specialised medical services.
Two are level 5 hospitals with 168 and 270-bed capacities and the remaining are level 4 hospitals with 158 and 54-bed capacities.
They identified 559 high-touch surfaces in the hospitals and swabbed samples that were examined for bacterial levels of contamination at Kemri.
These high-touch areas included the clinicians' gowns and medical instruments.
Others are items and surfaces close to the patient, such as patient beds, bed rails, baby cots, intravenous pole steering handles, newborn incubators, intravenous tubing, tray tabletops, baby weighing scale, bedside tabletops, room light switch plates, and room inner doorknobs.
“Sampling was carried out twice in each of the hospitals, between February and September 2018,” the researchers say.
A count of five colony-forming units of bacteria per square centimetre (CFU/cm²) on high-touch surfaces in the hospital is considered to be the upper limit for acceptable hospital surface hygiene.
But in the Kenyan facilities, all sampled surfaces had more than 10,0000 bacterial loads.
“The median bacterial load across the study hospitals was 10,000-fold higher than the acceptable level,” the researchers said.
Most of the surfaces were cleaned twice a day with bleach (sodium hypochlorite) which should remove and prevent the establishment of bacteria.
“It is likely that, in these study hospitals, either the bacterial loads were quickly re-established after cleaning to their former levels or substandard cleaning methods were used,” the researchers suggest.
Another explanation is that the cleaning bleach was over-diluted.
A key observation was that all the five study hospitals sampled had outsourced cleaning services, to reduce costs.
It is, therefore, likely cleaning companies do not observe the “National Infection Prevention and Control Guidelines for Health Care Services in Kenya” published by the Ministry of Health.
The researchers proposed hospital floors must be cleaned at least twice daily and the high-touch surfaces at least five times.
Also, the researchers said hospitals must stop relying only on visual inspections, but conduct bio-surveillance to determine cleanness.
-Edited by SKanyara