Hospital-based infections are a persistent problem in health care. As one observer put it, ”if you’re sick you may be admitted to the hospital, but that may the worst place to be if you’re sick.” Many illnesses involve immune resistance, and an immunocompromised patient is more susceptible to becoming infected. Despite many programs to reduce hospital infections, such as emphasizing hand-washing and using those ubiquitous hand sanitizers, there has been limited impact on the rate of hospital infections.
One of the problems has been the ability of various surfaces in a hospital to trap and retain bacteria, which can then be passed to the sick patient. One can easily envision this for fabrics or various kinds, but a recent study has implicated the “hard” surfaces of hospital beds. Most of the bed materials, such as rails, foot boards, and bed controls were made of hard plastic. The problem researchers have found is that, even with daily cleaning and disinfection, and especially in the ICU setting, the hard surfaces harbored many active bacterial colonies that resisted normal efforts to cleanse them.
A study done at the University of South Carolina found reduced infection rates when the plastic bed hard surfaces were replaced with copper. “Active colony forming units per 100 cm2 on beds with copper rails, foot boards, and bed controls were less than 10% of those seen on conventional beds,” reported Michael Schmidt, PhD, writing about the study in Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Dr. Schmidt further wrote: “The findings indicate that antimicrobial copper beds can assist infection control practitioners in their quest to keep healthcare surfaces hygienic between regular cleanings, thereby reducing the potential risk of transmitting bacteria associated with healthcare associated infections.”
Metallic copper surfaces kill bacteria through a “multi-modal mechanism based on its ability to disrupt bacterial respiration, generate superoxide, and destroy genomic and plasmid DNA in situ.” The copper not only retains fewer bacterial organisms, it tends to kill them. The result is that the bacterial burden found on copper surfaces are much lower than those on plastic surfaces.
There will be resistance to replacing plastic bed surfaces with copper because of the higher cost. However, the report’s authors note that “the value delivered by this intervention to the infection control bundle warrants further studies to assess its impact on HAI [hospital-acquired infection] rates ultimately leading to consideration for its adoption.”
Read the study here: [Self-Disinfecting Copper Beds Sustain Terminal Cleaning and Disinfection (TC&D) Effects Throughout Patient Care](https://aem.asm.org/content/early/2019/10/14/AEM.01886-19)
