United States – According to a newly published study, people who are being released from a hospital are taking antibiotic-resistant ‘superbugs’ home with them.
Family Members Face Higher MRSA Risk
A study showed that relatives of recently discharged patients are 71 times more likely to contract the MRSA than those who did not have discharged patients in their families, as reported by HealthDay.
Worse, if a relative stays long in the hospital and no matter whether the patient was never identified to have contracted MRSA, family members there are at risk as well.
“Patients can become colonized with MRSA during their hospital stay and transmit MRSA to their household members,” said lead researcher Aaron Miller, a research assistant professor of internal medicine-infectious diseases at the University of Iowa.
“This implies that Hospitals are a source that contributes to the spreading of MRSA into the community through patient’s discharge who are normally asymptotic carriers,” Miller also stated.
Common infections with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are hard to treat because they are unmoved by normal antibiotics, respectively, according to background information that researchers provided. MRSA can also cause severe infections when they get to the bloodstream or the lungs and can even be fatal.
A Persistent Threat in Hospitals and Beyond
Though MRSA is closely associated with hospitals and healthcare facilities, it can also be acquired in communities from skin-to-skin contact.
To conduct the study, investigators extracted information from a database of insurance claims of 158 million enrollees with at least two family members on the same health plan.
Study Findings
The team was able to single out more than 424,000 MRSA cases in nearly 343,000 insured individuals.
These were over 4,700 incidents possibly involving a relative of a recently hospitalized patient who came down with the superbug MRSA.
Others also identified another 8,000 possible spread within families touching surfaces where a newly discharged patient without positive MRSA had been.
For relatives who had a household member who had been hospitalized but did not have MRSA, the occurrence of the superbug was 44% higher for them, as studies reveal.
The study also showed that the longer a family member stayed at the hospital, the greater the probability that other members of the household may contract the disease.
A stay of one to three days was found to have an increased risk of 34% amongst family members at home for the acquisition of MRSA, whereas a stay of four to 10 days of hospital stay had an increased risk of 49%.
Said studies indicated that those requiring a hospital stay of more than ten days experienced a 70% to 80% elevated risk of getting a household MRSA infection.
Preventive Measures and Cautions
“This study addresses an important issue of the spread of pathogens linked with healthcare and underlines the central role of core infection measures,” Dr. Thomas Talbot, chief of hospital epidemiology at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, and the president of the Society of Healthcare Epidemiology of America said in the journal interview. Talbot was not involved with the technical research.
“Hand hygiene, environmental cleaning, and standard interventions to reduce Staphylococcal colonization are crucial to preventing the spread of resistant bacteria in healthcare settings,” Talbot said., as reported by HealthDay.
However, Miller noted that “while we identified a significant risk factor for transmission in the household and community, the absolute risk remains relatively low. It is important to not over-emphasize the hospital stay risk.”