SWINE flu and hospital superbugs may have a common weapon: the dirty hands of doctors and nurses that act as germ 鈥渟uperspreaders鈥�.
Didier Guillemot of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France, and colleagues created a mathematical model of a hypothetical intensive care unit (ICU) with a staff of 22.
They found that staff who saw all patients briefly were better at spreading germs than those who tended a few patients very closely. If just one of the former always failed to wash their hands, it caused more infections than if the entire staff forgot one-quarter of the time (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, ).
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Hospitals use the consumption of hand-hygiene products to monitor hand-washing, says team member Laura Temime of the National Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris. 鈥淥ur study suggests individual surveillance of hand hygiene would be better.鈥�
If the flu pandemic overwhelms ICUs, staff will tend more patients, creating more superspreaders.
