Abstract
Non-manual techniques for terminal disinfection of hospital rooms have gained increasing interest in recent years as means to reduce transmission of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). A prospective crossover study by Blazejewski and colleagues in five ICUs of a French academic hospital with a high prevalence of MDRO carriers showed that two different hydrogen peroxide (H2O2)-based non-touch disinfection techniques reduced environmental contamination with MDROs after routine cleaning. This study provides further evidence of the ‘in use’ bioburden reduction offered by these techniques. Before H2O2-based non-touch disinfection can be recommended for routine clinical use outside specific outbreak situations, further studies need to show whether the environmental contamination reduction provided by these techniques is clinically relevant and results in reduced cross-infections with MDROs.
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Abbreviations
- ESBL-E:
-
Extended spectrum β-lactamase Enterobacteriaceae
- H2O2 :
-
Hydrogen peroxide
- MDRO:
-
Multidrug-resistant organism
- MRSA:
-
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
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Acknowledgments
BDH is partially supported by the European Commission (FP7-HEALTH-2011-R-GNOSIS contract 282512).
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SH has received investigator-initiated research grants funded by Pfizer (New York, NY, USA) and B. Braun (Melsungen, Germany) and is a member of the advisory boards of Destiny Pharma (Brighton, UK), bioMérieux (Marcy l’Etoile, France), Novartis (Basel, Switzerland), and DaVolterra (Paris, France). BDH declares that he has no competing interests.
Authors’ contributions
BDH wrote the first draft of the commentary, and SH revised the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.
See related research by Blazejewski et al., http://ccforum.com/content/19/1/30
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Huttner, B.D., Harbarth, S. Hydrogen peroxide room disinfection – ready for prime time?. Crit Care 19, 216 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-015-0915-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13054-015-0915-8