UV light can help hospitals clean up their act

Disease and infection can move through a hospital, including transmission from one patient to the next one to use the same room. A study, published in The Lancet, recently found that disinfection methods using ultraviolet (UV) light decrease the transmission of infectious diseases by 30 percent.

The study included 21,395 patients who stayed in a hospital bed overnight after a patient with a positive culture had stayed in the same bed. To conclude the most effective measure of disinfection, researchers compared the conventional disinfection method of quaternary ammonium with using quaternary ammonium followed by UV light, chlorine bleach instead of quaternary ammonium with no UV light and bleach with UV light.

Researchers tested these disinfection methods on MRSA, vancomycin-resistant enterococci, C. difficile and multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter. Nine hospitals in the southeastern U.S. used the Tru-D SmartUVC, which emits UV light for 30 minutes, to disinfect the rooms once occupied by patients with one of the four drug-resistant diseases.

"Some of these germs can live on the environment so long that even after a patient with the organism has left the room and it has been cleaned, the next patient in the room could potentially be exposed," said Deverick J. Anderson, MD, an infectious disease specialist at Duke Health and lead investigator of the trial. "Infections from one of these bugs are tough and expensive to treat and can be truly debilitating for a patient. For hospitals, these infections also cause a burden of costs that often aren't reimbursable."

Results showed that using quaternary ammonium followed by UV light was the most effective method of disinfection. The method of using bleach instead of quaternary ammonium decreased transmission of vancomycin-resistant enterococci by 50 percent. Adding UV light afterward cut transmission rates to 64 percent. In the case of C. difficile and Acinetobacte, none of the cleaning methods had a deep enough impact in decreasing transmission to be included. Overall, the use of UV light cut the transmission of infectious diseases by 30 percent.