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VOL. XIII NO. 4
www.healthcareenvironmentalsolutions.com
WINTER 2017
Attention Readers !
Are you looking for Products, Equipment or Services for your business or healthcare facility? If so, please check out these leading companies advertised in this issue:
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Study:
Using Antibiotics to Treat Superbugs May Lead to Other Infections
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By P.J. Heller
reating multidrug-resistant organisms with antibiotics is commonplace in healthcare facilities. Even so, antibiotic-resistant infections remain a significant threat. Researchers at the University of Michigan, however, suggest that fighting these so-called superbugs is being hindered by targeting individual multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) and neglecting the fact that there are multiple circulating MDRO species in healthcare institutions whose propagation is driven by competing risk factors. In effect, the researchers suggest, using antibiotics to treat one particular MDRO may result in others. Rather than simply looking at one MDRO, healthcare practitioners need to consider such bacteria as part of an antibioticresistant ecosystem to see how MDROs interact with one other and with antibiotics. “This single-species view of MDRO epidemiology does not reflect the complex
reality; most healthcare facilities have multiple circulating MDRO species and individuals are often colonized by more than one MDRO,” they say. “Thus, interventions based on a singlespecies perspective can result in unintended consequences.” That conclusion is based on a study of 234 nursing home patients in the Ann Arbor and Detroit areas. Forty percent of the frail elderly patients in the study had more than one MDRO living on their bodies. Patients who had specific pairs of MDROs were more likely to develop a urinary tract infection involving an MDRO. The study, Network of Microbial and Antibiotic Interactions Drive Colonization and Infection with Multidrug-resistant Organisms, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Included in the study was a map of interactions among bacteria and classes of antibiotics. Such mapping could eventually help
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