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Cell Phones May Spread Infections
CHaN_316 writes "Yahoo is running an article talking about how cell phones from health workers are helping spread dangerous infections in hospitals. 'They found that 12 percent of healthcare providers' cell phones were contaminated with [Acinetobacter baumannii]. The results are disturbing because [it] has the propensity to develop resistance to almost all available antibiotics ... Cell phones provide a large dry surface that allows survival of A. baumannii--it requires no nutrients ... [it] is found in intensive care units, and the mortality rate among infected patients is very high -- between 50 and 60 percent.' The hospital that conducted this research no longer allows the use of cell phones, and are switching to devices that don't require hand contact like pagers." So how long before someone develops a cell phone that can be dunked in alcohol or run through the autoclave to sterilize it?
that health care workers DO take all kinds of sterile environment precautions, right?
Actually, you can sterilize just about anything but the cost and time are prohibitive. There is a sterilization process that uses gas where I have sterilized entire computers, monitors, mouse and keyboards that were placed in operating rooms. Also I have sterlized sensitive electronics that could not take either pressure or temperature that survived gas sterilization just fine. It is a trade off between cost of the sterilization process, the time it takes the equipment to be done, and the usefullness of the equipment.
Well, you can't autoclave it. They usually only do this with certain metals, since they can withstand the heat involved.
You could theoretically dip it in a biocide of some sort (they use stuff tougher than alcohol in operating rooms and on used surgical tools) but there's a "nook & cranny" problem. When designing non-metal surgical tools, you have to make sure you don't make any tiny cracks, holes, or grooves where stuff can cling and avoid the biocide. The last cell phone I saw had a lot of nooks and crannies. You'd possibly need to redesign one to be completely sealed, which is getting more feasible because of wireless battery charging technologies and wireless connectivity technologies.
Another alternative is that you could stick it in a sterile container and use it wirelessly, but then your wireless headset would still need to be sterilizable.
-- Fratz, human
Simple... Do not use cellphones in hospitals.
All radio (send) devices in hospitals should be (and are in some hospitals) banned due to possible interferrence with sensative medical equipment.
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
Actually, he wasn't. His ludicrous "telephone sanitizers" weren't made up. It's a normal part of British culture. Don't believe me? Get your telephone sanitizers here, here and here. All .co.uk addresses, natually.
Yes, it did blow my mind when I moved to the UK and discovered that this wasn't Douglas Adams fiction, it was sitting on every desk.
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Other things that will have the same problem:
Banning the offending object isn't the way ahead. Increasing awareness of the problem is much better.
Sitting on every desk? Bollocks. I'm sure they exist, but I've never seen them used in my life. Come off it, old chap.
Signed,
A. Brit
Every damn hospital I've ever set foot in outright forbids the use of cell phones on hospital premises. (Use as defined in having it switched on)
Apparently they can lead to nasty interactions with some of the delicate electronics they have running in hospitals and kill patients in the process.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
They are available as wipes, most large companies supply them.
I thought people were not supposed to use cell phones in hospitals. Why are they even there?
There was some panic over this early on, but it turned out to be a minimal issue.
When I was working at a hospital, we did some testing of cellular devices and medical equipment. See, medical equipment gets an exemption from the regular FCC shielding requirements for some historical reason, and we all know if you're broadcasting interference you're an antenna too, and you don't have to accept interference if you're a medical device.
That said, abuse isn't as rampant as assumed. With older analog phones (higher wattage) the only device found to be a problem was a ventilator device within about 6' of the cell phone, IIRC.
What's not terribly intuitive is that one of the best ways to deal with the problem is to work with a cellular provider to put a 'tower' right on the hospital. If the tower is that close, the phones need to use far less power to broadcast, hence less interference. The new digital units are all lower-powered to begin with too, so the problem is further decreased.
So, if you're going to visit a friend in the ICU, make sure you turn off your phone before going into the patient's room, but if you're sitting in the waiting room, it's not likely you'll cause problems.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Differance being of course, that Mr. Adams had an entire section of the workforce devoted to going around and sanatizing phones, not just little wipes sitting on the desk.
Xaotik Designs
I am not absolutely positive, but I believe they were on the "B" Ark, not "C". You'll have to double check ofcourse, but since I am not at home I do not have my HHGTTG with me. :-(
I should have my towel around here though...
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
There are a lot of different answers to this question because the term "medical staff" covers a lot of different people with different functions.
Surgeons take calls during procedures. They always have, long before there were even cordless phones, much less cell phones. Medical treatment is sometimes dependent upon the rapid dispersal of information and an equally rapid decision being made in response to said information. I've talked to more than a few chest surgeons on the phone while they had their hands in someone else's chest. This was accomplished (aseptically) by speaker phone.
With the advent of cell phones, many health care providers who care for patients dependent upon rapid decision-making carry cell phones with them 24/7/365. This easy access to decision-making resources has saved lives and reduced suffering, but these people represent a tiny, tiny fraction of the health care workers carrying cell phones today.
Having said that, health care workers are people first, and there exists roughly the same proportion of stupid, thoughtless people in the industry as exist in the world at large. So, many health care workers use phones thoughtlessly. Should they stop? Sure.
Wedding rings are virtual cesspools of virulent bacteria, particularly if they are engraved and/or contain a complex setting. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get people to take off their wedding rings while working in ICU's even though we have reams of good, hard science demonstrating that rings are a very efficient way to infect patients with all kinds of deadly bugs? Forget cell phones, it's just another surface, just another pathogen vehicle. It's just a particularly powerful vehicle because people touch it with their hands.
I despise cell phones only slightly more than I despise strollers. They are both a menace to civility in public space. But, there's nothing new here. My point is the cell phone problem discussed in this story, and all other similar hand-contamination vectors (past, present and future) can be stopped dead with 15 seconds of hand-washing. Just using running water , i.e., without soap, is almost as effective. It's not hard, it's just inconvenient.
The best way to do is to be.
It really comes down to hand-washing.
If you wash your hands between patients (and especially before going to see someone who's immune system has taken a hit... chemo, HIV, SCID, etc, etc), you'll cut down dramatically on the spread of disease.
The nosocomial, or hospital-acquired infections are the worst actors... multiply-resistant, and prevelant in the one location where sick and vulnerable people are gathered in one place.
This doesn't leave out healthcare workers. Your own commensal organisms that live on your skin and in your gut tend to be wild-type, and less-resistant than nosocomials.... until you wipe them out by doing something dumb, like taking antibiotics for an infection that's viral, or would clear up on its own given a little time (mild sinusitis, for example). This is why I advocate avoiding antibiotics unless clearly indicated... this includes taking antibiotics for infections that would get better with good wound care alone... like boils and smaller cutaneous abscesses. If you work in a health care facility, your normal bacterial population is the only thing protecting you from mass colonization with resistant bugs, particularly if you work with critically-ill patients. You don't want to get really sick with something, then find out there's nothing that can treat your infection... I've seen it happen to too many patients.
So yes, wash your hands... and don't take antibiotics unless you damned well NEED them... If I personally get sick, and all the antibiotics are going to do is shorten my disease course by a day or two, I'll skip them... I'm not sacrificing my precious normal flora for such a minimal gain.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
How does a pager not require hand contact? Dont you touch it? This is stupid the solution is to make health care workers actually wash their hands more. Plus, outpatient care generally results in fewer infections.
The problem with antibiotic abuse in health care workers is particularly troubling, as you describe. I'm like you, I don't take them unless my clinical situation indicates it--meaning I have the right drug for the right bug and I'm getting worse instead of better.
Don't even get me started on anti-bacterial soaps.... Not only does their misuse compound the problems we've discussed above, but these soaps only kill off the same flora that our antibiotics (particularly the cheap and safe ones) do, leaving the drug-resistant flora relatively unaffected. As they get washed into our communal water-treatment facilities, the drug-resistant strains are then left with reduced competiton for the limited, consumable resources (like food) that they need to live and multiply.
Because of the use of the "New and Improved Anti-bacterial ____," we encourage the survival and colonization of the very bugs that cause the illnesses for which we don't have good and/or cheap antibiotics. I particularly regret seeing antibacterials used routinely at home around infants, which is the use for which they are most aggressively marketed....
But, I've wandered sufficiently off topic for now.
The best way to do is to be.
From Harrison's Princples of Internal Medicine 15th edition, 2001:
(bold is my emphasis added)No, In fact, once the planet got rid of their telephone sanitizers the people on the planet "were suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone."
Also, here is a link to the history of the term "telephone sanitizer".
The problem with this is that any radiation (UV, X-ray, hard gammas) that you might choose to use to sterilize the telephone will also likely degrade the plastic from which it is constructed.
Depending on the particular composition of the telephone, radiation may cause either brittleness or softening of the plastic case and buttons. The clear display window will probably yellow or cloud, before failing completely. I would anticipate that there is potential for damage to the LCD itself, but that's not one of my areas of expertise.
In addition, UV has virtually zero penetrating power, so bacteria can hide inside cracks and openings in the phone, or even behind little bits of dirt or grime.
~Idarubicin
Unless specifically designed with UV irradiation in mind, the plastic of the phone would probably become brittle.
Also, UV is extremely vulnerable to nook-and-cranny failures. Any part of the phone that is potentially shaded--around buttons, holes in the speaker or microphone grille--can protect bacteria from UV exposure. Actually, just a little bit of dirt or dust can provide sufficient shade to permit bacteria to survive. UV works quite well on airborne pathogens, but surfaces must be carefully designed with UV sterilization in mind.
~Idarubicin