SWINE flu and hospital superbugs may have a common weapon: the dirty hands of doctors and nurses that act as germ “superspreaders”.
Didier Guillemot of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and colleagues created a mathematical model of a hypothetical intensive care unit (ICU) with a staff of 22.
They found that staff who saw all patients briefly were better at spreading germs than those who tended a few patients very closely. If just one of the former always failed to wash their hands, it caused more infections than if the entire staff forgot one-quarter of the time (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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Hospitals use the consumption of hand-hygiene products to monitor hand-washing, says team member Laura Temime of the National Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris. “Our study suggests individual surveillance of hand hygiene would be better.”
If the flu pandemic overwhelms ICUs, staff will tend more patients, creating more superspreaders.
