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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?
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
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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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
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.
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".