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| Associated Press - FILE - In this Wednesday, March 30, 2011 file photo, a bed bug is displayed at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History in Washington. |
As if adapting to health-care reform and curbing the “nightmare
bacteria” weren’t challenge enough, hospitals are increasingly plagued
by another problem: bedbugs.
More than a third of pest-management
companies treated bedbug infestations in hospitals in 2012, 6% more
than the year before and more than twice as many as in 2010, according
to a survey released today by the National Pest Management Association.
The percentage of exterminators dealing with bedbugs in nursing homes
has also almost doubled since 2010, to 46%. Bedbug experts also report
seeing them in ambulances.
Hospitals are already cracking down on anything that could increase
the risk of patient infections, which not only can be deadly but may
also lead to more readmissions and reduced federal funding under the
Affordable Care Act. While bedbugs have not been found to transmit
infections to humans, they leave itchy bites after feeding on people’s
blood, which can lead to secondary infections when victims scratch,
opening themselves up to bacteria. This is especially problematic in
hospitals, where there is a greater likelihood of catching the highly
potent and contagious staph infection known as MRSA, says Dr. Jorge
Parada, medical director of the infection prevention and control program
of Loyola University Health System in Chicago. “You don’t need one more
ingredient to increase your risk of infections in the hospital,” he
says.
Although hospitals are putting a growing emphasis on strict
cleanliness and sterilization protocols, bedbugs still arrive via the
many patients and visitors going in and out of their emergency rooms and
waiting areas. “We never know when somebody might show up with
bedbugs,” Parada says.
The high instance of bedbugs in nursing homes is also concerning, he
adds, because hospitals receive many transfers from such facilities, and
elderly people often don’t exhibit the same telltale signs of
bedbugs—red, raised, itchy lesions—that other patients do: “It’s one
less tipoff that it’s a problem.”
To be sure, say experts, you’re still more likely to catch other
kinds of bugs in hospitals than you are to get bedbugs—and they aren’t a
medical emergency the way other complications would be, says Missy
Henriksen of the National Pest Management Association. That said, if
bedbugs become a problem in a hospital, they can be a persistent
nuisance. “The bedbugs, and particularly the eggs of bedbugs, are even
harder to kill than the spores of the bacteria,” says Dr. Dick Zoutman, a
professor and infectious disease specialist at Queen’s University in
Ontario, Canada. “I wouldn’t have thought that to be the case.”
Zoutman
helped develop a new hospital sterilization system that can kill highly
drug-resistant bacteria as well as bedbugs. The sterilization
technology, marketed as AsepticSure by San Francisco-based Medizone
International—a firm that is traded over-the-counter as MZEI.OB and
MZEI.QB—uses gas to effectively eradicate 100% of bacteria in less than
an hour, according to the company. Medizone just began distributing its
new disinfecting technology to Canadian hospitals earlier this month,
and is seeking approval to market it in the U.S., too.
But
Zoutman, who now serves as Medizone’s chief medical officer, says that
in tests, the system took up to 24 hours to kill bedbugs, and up to 36
hours to kill their eggs. He says Medizone is now working to adapt the
system to kill bedbugs in a faster and more effective manner, both for
hospitals and other settings as well.
Advances like that would be
eagerly welcomed in hospitals, but for now, exterminators are their
only realistic option for addressing a pest invasion. “No patient,”
Parada says, “is going to look favorably on a hospital that’s had a
bedbug infestation.”
By Jen Wieczner
source yahoonews
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