Effort Brings Catheter Infections from 27 per 10,000 to zero

December 29, 2006

[Why would anyone fail to adopt the means to avoid 28,000 deaths per

year? That's half the road deaths in the US per year.]

Hospitals cut medicine tube infections in study

Reuters Health

Thursday, December 28, 2006

By Gene Emery

BOSTON (Reuters Life!) - Hospitals in Michigan nearly eliminated

often-deadly infections involving tubes that deliver fluids and

medicine to patients by stressing better hygiene and other

preventive steps, a U.S. study showed.

The catheters cause about 80,000 bloodstream infections per year in

the United States, infections so serious that up to 28,000 of the

patients die. Fighting the infections costs about $2.3 billion

annually.

Hoping to reverse that trend, 108 intensive care units in the state

of Michigan joined a project launched in October 2003 that included

procedures designed to reduce infection - from better hand-washing

to special cleaning and insertion procedures to removing unnecessary

catheters when possible.

At the start of the study, there were 27 infections for every 10,000

days a catheter was in place, said the team led by Pronovost

of s Hopkins University in Baltimore.

After three months, the rate had dropped to zero. It stayed that low

for the remaining 15 months of the study.

" All types of participating hospitals realized a similar

improvement, " the researchers said in the study to be published in

Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The decline was described as " remarkable " in a Journal editorial by

Wenzel and Edmond of Virginia Commonwealth

University.

They said the techniques should be embraced by all hospitals, which

tend to adopt safety practices in a scattershot manner.

<snip>

Reuters Health

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