Make sure to disinfect beds properly after they are used by someone with Clostridioides difficile, or C. diff. According to a new study, staying in a bed previously used by a person with C. diff raises the risk that they’ll get the infection.
The team from Emory University School of Medicine used a real-time location system to track the movement of hospital beds at two academic medical centers between April 2018 and August 2019. The study was published Dec. 13 in Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology.
People were defined as being exposed to a potentially contaminated bed if, within the seven days before their diagnosis, they stayed in a bed that had a person in it with C. diff in the previous 90 days. The team controlled for time at risk and intensive care unit (ICU) admission.
Researchers evaluated 25,032 hospital encounters with 18,860 patients. Of the people, 51.7% were female, and the median age was 61 years old. There were 237 cases of hospital-onset C. diff. Exposure to a contaminated bed was associated with a 1.8 times greater chance for getting C. diff in the hospital. Even when the scientists varied the length of time they thought the bed would remain contaminated (from 90 days to 60, 30, 14, or seven days), the association remained.
Additionally, exposure to a contaminated hospital room was associated with hospital-onset C. diff in adjusted and unadjusted analysis. Overall 62% of the relationship between the infection and exposure to a contaminated bed was due to direct and indirect interaction with a hospital room that was contaminated.
“New technologies or cleaning and disinfection methods that can better eradicate C. difficile spores from a hospital bed and/or the surrounding healthcare environment may lead to significant reductions in healthcare transmission of C. difficile and decrease rates of HO-CDI,” the study authors stated.
