If your child goes to the hospital, could he or she get sick?
Doctors at the Johns Hopkins pediatric intensive care unit are testing every child to try to eliminate the spread of drug-resistant superbugs inside the hospital.
“We know that weekly screening is just a sample of everybody that comes in. We started doing routine screening of everybody that comes in March 1,” said Dr. Aaron Milstone, pediatric infectious diseases research fellow at Hopkins and study leader.
Hopkins? hunt for methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus goes above standard hospital practices, in which tests are only ordered after symptoms or early signs of infection appear.
A previous study, involving spot screenings every week, revealed more carriers of the germs than standard practices. Those infected are isolated from other patients for the duration of their stay.
Admission screening is standard at Johns Hopkins for adult intensive care units.
The results of the study were presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Society of Health Care Epidemiology of America in Baltimore, along with the argument that better screening can slow the spread of germs in hospitalized children.
Weekly testing revealed MRSA, the most common superbug, in 54 percent of the patients, 1.5 times more cases than routine testing caught. Results for VRE, a lesser-known but still-common superbug, were six times higher with weekly testing. Standard guidelines missed 82 percent of those cases.
Like most bacteria, hospital superbugs are picked up through direct contact: by touching someone or a surface with it.
“The results were quite clear to us: Aggressive patient safety programs should consider testing on admission as standard practice,” study senior author and hospital epidemiologist Dr. Trish Perl said in a statement.
However, the verdict is out on whether this study will pay off enough to make more hospitals pick up the tab ? or even whether Hopkins will sustain these practices in the long run.
“If you?re a parent, it?s hard to understand why the doctors wouldn?t want to know,” Milstone said. “But there are questions. Is it cost effective? Are our own rates high enough that we should keep going? There are lots of questions that still aren?t answered.”
