NEWS in SCIENCE
When Your Hospital Stay Gets Even Worse
By K.T.
Nobody likes staying in a hospital, but sometimes when you’re sick or injured it’s the only thing that can make you better. What happens though when your stay in the hospital makes you sicker than you were to start with? One problem hospitals often have is when people pick up an infection while staying in a hospital.
It makes sense. Hundreds of sick people all in one building, spreading their germs. This is an issue in every hospital on the planet, but the problem is much worse in 3rd World countries. A team of scientists came together and studied these infections that happened at a hospital in Bangalore, India.
Sadly, the study found that kids had a big chance to develop these infections. In fact, the number is as high as 20-50%. Risk factors such as not getting enough to eat make these children have a greater risk of developing an infection than a child in the 1st world. Staying in the hospital is bad enough, but can you imagine being a little kid sick enough to end up in the hospital only to get even sicker just from being there?
Plus, these infections are very dangerous, especially for kids. There are so many different types of germs floating around that a hospital might have that cause them too. The scientists writing about this issue did tests to find out what kind of little critters they had floating around in their air. They found 16 different organisms (germs) that could cause infections, just in one hospital!
Hospitals are always trying new things to figure out how to cut down on infections, and this hospital was no exception. The scientists found that when alcohol was used to disinfect the skin when a procedure was done, then this stopped a lot of infections.
It is important to work on this problem. Kids are the most vulnerable population in any country, and it is the world’s responsibility to do something to make their lives better, no matter where they live.
Lakshiminarayana, S.A., Prakash, R., Ramya, A., Sangeetha, S. (2017). “Blood Stream Infection in Pediatric Patients of a Tertiary Care Hospital.” International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences. 2319-7706 6(3) 1444-1449. doi: https://doi.org/10.20546/ijcmas.2017.603.164
https://www.ijcmas.com/6-3-2017/A.%20Ramya,%20et%20al.pdf
Please send any questions or comments to Dr. Spitzer (spitzern@marshall.edu )
Note: Any opinions expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent those of Dr. Spitzer, the Department of Biological Sciences, or Marshall University.