Abstract
In the healthcare environment, microorganisms’ cross-transmission between inanimate surfaces and patients or healthcare workers can lead to healthcare-associated infections. A recent interest has grown to create antimicrobial copper touch surfaces, in order to counteract microbial spread in the healthcare environment. For the first time, five French long-term care facilities were at 50% fitted with copper alloys door handles and handrails. Related to the environmental bacterial contamination, 1400 samples were carried out on copper and control surfaces over three years after copper installation. In addition, some copper door handles were taken from the different facilities, and their specific activity against methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) was tested in vitro. In comparison to control surfaces, copper door handles and handrails revealed significantly lower contamination levels. This difference was observed in the five long-term care facilities and it persists through the three years of the study. High and extreme levels of bacterial contamination were less frequent on copper surfaces. Although, the antibacterial activity of copper surfaces against MRSA was lowered after three years of regular use, it was still significant as compared to inert control surfaces. Therefore, copper containing surfaces are promising actors in the non-spreading of environmental bacterial contamination in healthcare facilities.
Highlights
Among the various problems to deal with in medicalized environment, healthcare-associated infections (HAI) currently represent one of the biggest threats for resident and hospitalized persons all around the world
Looking at the frequencies of low and high levels of contaminations (Figure 1b), we can see that the copper door handles and handrails are much less frequently contaminated than the controls
Looking at very low contaminations, 21% of the copper door handles showed less than 1 colony-forming units (CFU)/cm2 on their surface, as compared to only 11% for the control door handles
Summary
Among the various problems to deal with in medicalized environment, healthcare-associated infections (HAI) currently represent one of the biggest threats for resident and hospitalized persons all around the world. In 2012, in Europe, the HAI prevalence was around 6%, ranging from 2% to 11% for overall European countries [2]. Microorganisms can spread from resident to resident [3] and from resident to staff through different pathways. Direct contact between people is the most obvious factor of microbial cross-contamination. The hands of a healthcare worker can have a high risk of being contaminated following a direct skin contact with infected patient [4,5,6], and hand hygiene is the first strategy for preventing healthcare-associated infections [7].
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