Few data are available regarding the types of patient care activity that result in the transmission of patient flora to health care worker (HCW) hands. 1 Here, we assessed the contamination of HCW gloved hands during routine patient care (i.e., bed bath and dressing changes) in an eight-bed adult intensive care unit of a 120-bed Brazilian university hospital. The study was conducted from May 9 to June 21, 2011, and was approved by the hospital ethics committee. All five patients included in this study had bloodstream infections and clinical isolates of multidrug-resistant (MDR) Acinetobacter baumannii 2 from blood culture, catheter tip, or tracheal aspirate. Fingertip cultures from the hands of six HCWs were performed immediately after patient care by the fingerstreak technique, 3 in which the five fingers of each gloved hand were drawn with gentle pressure across the surface of a plate of MacConkey agar containing 3% of agar (Figure 1). Two patients were sampled once, and three were sampled four times. Each sample was taken on a different day. MDR A. baumannii isolates were recovered in all 14 samples. Bacterial isolates were identified by MicroScan 1 and conventional tests. 4 Molecular typing by enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus-polymerase chain reaction 5 showed that all MDR A. baumannii isolates belonged to the same genotype. Our results clearly demonstrate that HCWs must change their gloves between caring for patients, and also that when they remove their gloves, they must wash their hands before donning new gloves to care for another patient.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.