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‘No touch’ cleaning technology reduced nosocomial C. difficile rates
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A “no touch” hospital room cleaning system using hydrogen peroxide vapor technology significantly reduced the rates of Clostridium difficile-associated diarrhea, recent data suggest.
“There is a tendency to think that one round of cleaning and disinfection of rooms vacated by a patient with C. difficile should be enough to eliminate the risk of infection for the next occupant,” Farrin A. Manian, MD, MPH, an infectious diseases specialist at Mercy Hospital in St. Louis, told Infectious Disease News. “This may be wishful thinking in the real world we live in. Hospitals and other health care facilities with ongoing endemic transmission of C. difficile may want to consider multiple rounds of manual disinfection with bleach, or use of hydrogen peroxide vapor, to reduce rates of C. difficile infection.”
Farrin A. Manian
Manian and colleagues conducted a retrospective, quasi-experimental study of hydrogen peroxide vapor technology in a 900-bed community hospital. During a pre-intervention period, rooms that were previously occupied by patients with C. difficile-associated diarrhea were cleaned with one or more rounds of bleach. During the intervention period, rooms with these patients were cleaned with bleach followed by hydrogen peroxide vapor decontamination.
Eight hundred seventy rooms in the hospital underwent 1,123 rounds of cleaning with hydrogen peroxide vapor. There was a significant decrease in the rates of C. difficile-associated diarrhea. During the pre-intervention years of 2007 and 2008, the rates were 0.83 cases per 1,000 patient-days and 0.93 cases per 1,000 patient-days, respectively. In 2009, the intervention year, the rate was 0.55 cases per 1,000 patient-days (rate ratio=0.63; 95% CI, 0.50-0.79).
When the researchers considered possible confounding factors, they found no difference in hand hygiene rates or compliance with gown and glove precautions for entering isolation rooms.
“Since C. difficile infection and vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) gastrointestinal colonization often go hand-in-hand, our findings have led us to assess the impact of our intensive terminal room cleaning and disinfection program on our nosocomial VRE infection rates,” Manian said. “We are in the process of analyzing the data.”
Disclosure: Manian reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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