The Microbial Footprint We Leave Behind

     Hospitals are thought of to be sanitary and clean right?  Well once we check in, or even visit, we leave behind our microbial footprint.  There is a study where officials are swabbing a new hospital to identify pattern of microbes and pathogens.  The research began as soon as the hospital was up in January 2013, taking swabs of light switches, floors, air ways, water systems, and bed rails at a hospital located in Chicago.  When the hospital was open to the public, workers and patients were also swabbed...an estimated 15,000 swabs are expected by the end of the study...Impressive, right?
     After collecting about 4,500 swabs, and analyzing 600 of those, researchers say that the microbe community has changed just DAYS after the doors were opened!  70,000 of those Microbes are thought to have moved in due to construction, shocking right?

"Gilbert and his team found significant differences between microbial communities in individual hospital rooms. Patients who stayed for only short periods, such as those undergoing elective surgery, had a transient influence on their rooms’ microbial communities; after cleaning, the rooms reverted to a pre-patient state. Microbes from long-term patients — including people with cancer or those who had received organ transplants — had time to settle into the rooms. The patients' microbial fingerprints lingered after they checked out of the hospital and their rooms were cleaned."

Clearly, we all have our own microbial footprint we leave behind, whether we are there long term or short term.  Strangely, no pathogens have been discovered...yet.  So where do hospital-related infection come from?  This study still has more to prove but it will be interesting when a pathogen does show up.  We all have a human microbiome, only makes sense that a hospital does, too!  A hospital microbiome!


http://www.nature.com/news/patients-leave-a-microbial-mark-on-hospitals-1.13057