Medicine

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How Can Hospital-Acquired Infections Be Avoided?

People go to hospitals to heal, but according to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly 100,000 people die from infections acquired during hospital stays every year -- and that's just in the United States.

Thankfully, experts like Michael G. Schmidt are trying to change these tragic statistics. Schmidt, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Medical University of South Carolina, led a research team that in 2019 located one possible culprit: hospital beds. According to their study, replacing standard hospital beds in intensive care units with copper beds can drastically reduce the risk of infection.

Copper hospital beds have been found to carry 95% fewer bacteria than traditional hospital beds with plastic components.

Copper beds were found to harbor 95 percent fewer bacteria throughout a patient's stay. Until recently, beds made entirely of copper were not commercially available, but they now offer a route toward much-improved patient care and safety, Schmidt said.

"Despite the best efforts by environmental services workers, they are neither cleaned often enough, nor well enough," Schmidt said. During the study, the researchers examined conventional ICU beds, which usually contain plastic surfaces. They took bacterial samples from the plastic rails and found that nearly 90 percent of the samples contained bacterial levels considered unsafe.

Hospital history:

In 1924, Jimmy Carter became the first future U.S. president to be born in a hospital.

People injure themselves so frequently when cutting bagels that emergency personnel have a specific term for these injuries: BRIs (bagel-related injuries). BRIs send around 2,000 people to the emergency room every year.