Disinfectants and antibiotic resistant “bugs.”

Source: BBC Health

You might want to re-think those little hand sanitizer gels and wipes we are all fond of carrying around or the antibacterial soaps.  Researchers now believe that so-called super bugs (antibiotic resistant bacteria such as MRSA and VRE) can be taught drug resistance from resisting surface disinfectants.

The latest research involves Pseudomonas Aeruginosa a common hospital present and hospital acquired organism. Testing the bug with increasingly larger levels of disinfectants in a laboratory led to a surprising finding.  Not only did the bacteria become resistance to the disinfectant, it developed a resistance to Ciproflaxin (an antibiotic), to which it was not previously exposed.

Studies have previously shown that policies and procedures doing little other than requiring disinfectant wipes in hospitals did little to protect against MRSA and that they actually could spread the bug if the wipe was used upon more than one surface.

~Posted by David Marc Schwadron, Esquire