Hospital Room Disinfection System Helps Keep Ward Free from MRSA After Outbreak

Medizone International, Inc. reports that an entire ward at a public hospital remains 100 percent free from MRSA for six months after a major outbreak was quashed due to the introduction of a new hospital room disinfection technology. In early June 2013, seven patient rooms on a 14 room ward at Quinte Health Care's Belleville General Hospital in Ontario, Canada were quarantined after being hit by a rapidly spreading strain of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

Dr. Dick Zoutman, chief of staff for the hospital, notes, "On average we have had one or two new MRSA cases per month on the ward.  This is in keeping with averages being reported within the health care system nationally. In June we noted a rapidly spreading MRSA problem on the ward that reached seven rooms over a short period of time. That is when we began using Medizone International's AsepticSure® room disinfection system. It is the only system we know of that can actually eliminate 100 percent of infective pathogens with a single room treatment. We have learned that obtaining even a 99.9 percent bacterial kill is not enough, as the remaining 0.1 percent of bacteria immediately begin growing back causing the problem of infection to start all over again in a few short hours. AsepticSure is proven to kill bacterial spores that can lurk in hospital rooms for months." Zoutman is a co-inventor of the AsepticSure system, along with Dr. Michael E. Shannon.

"The results were immediate," Zoutman says. "MRSA was immediately and entirely eliminated from the ward. The AsepticSure system was straightforward to use and quick, with complete room disinfection occurring in an hour. To prove to ourselves that the AsepticSure system was working, we performed cultures of 120 surfaces of the treated rooms before and after the AsepticSure system was used. The results were amazing. Virtual complete elimination of all bacteria on the room surfaces after AsepticSure was used in the rooms. However, the longer term effects were not fully appreciated until after a six-month follow up had been completed. Only then was it realized that not only had the rooms remained free of MRSA, no further cases of MRSA  were noted on the ward during this period."

"It is noteworthy in this regard," says Dr. Michael E. Shannon, president of Medizone International and a former director general of the Laboratory Center for Disease Control at Health Canada, "that in addition to full room disinfection, all support equipment associated with each contaminated room were also disinfected using AsepticSure and this may have played an important role as well in virtually eliminating MRSA from the ward. These mobile pieces of patient care equipment are notoriously hard to clean by hand. AsepticSure made disinfecting them very easy. Given that hospital acquired infections are now considered to be the fourth leading cause of death in both the United States and Canada, this could be a game changer."

Source: Medizone International, Inc.