Interesting blog posted by Jon Otter in “ Reflections on Infection prevention and Control”
He describes a new study in PLOS Genetics which provides new insight into the transmission of bacteria in the Intensive Care Unit setting using Whole Genome Sequencing. The authors performed WGS on virtually all bacterial isolates from ICUs in a US hospital for a year. The first surprise was that 12% of the bacteria considered clinically relevant were previously undescribed.
The next surprise was that whilst transmission of the usual suspect pathogens (MRSA, VRE etc) was rare, 9% of the other bacteria were shared by multiple patients, often with overlapping hospital admissions. This suggests that there is a fair bit of transmission going on under the radar in the ICU setting.
The blog can be found at: http://reflectionsipc.com/2015/08/13/its-transmission-doc-but-not-as-we-know-it/#comments
The article can be found at: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005413