Abstract
WHEN the burn unit at Uppsala University Hospital was opened in 1968, it was designed after the principles of Colebrook’s classic work (1950). It has 6 single patient isolation rooms with individual air locks and plenum ventilation at 44 air changes per hour. During every visit to an isolation room staff wore full operating room dress with a sterile cotton gown, cap, mask, sterile gloves and shoe covers. Despite these costly and cumbersome efforts, the crosscolonization rate in the burn patients with Staphylococcus aureus soon rose to above 70 per cent (Hambraeus, 1973a). This rate is as high as that found in bum patients nursed in conventional wards (Cason et al., 1966). Experiments with airborne tracer particles showed that the spread of S. aureus between isolation rooms was primarily airborne in less than 0.5 per cent of the cases (Hambraeus, 1973b). S. aureus from other patients, found in the air of a room, were mainly carried on nurses’ clothes and redispersed from the clothes when the nurses moved (Hambraeus, 1973c), a finding which has also been confirmed in general wards (Lidwell et al., 1975). The purpose of this investigation was to evaluate attempts to prevent cross-colonization between bum patients via clothes.
Published Version
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