December 28, 2023
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Key takeaways:
- Contamination of health care environments near patients with C. auris occurs very quickly, often within 4 hours.
- Most C. auris carriers were co-colonized with at least one bacterial multidrug-resistant organism.
Contamination of the health care environments near patients who are colonized with Candida auris often occurs within 4 hours, researchers found.
Contamination of the health care environments around patients colonized with Candida auris happens quickly — often within 4 hours after disinfection took place — researchers said. Image: Adobe Stock.
“We designed this study to understand how quickly Candida auris contaminates the environment near colonized patients, and to identify risk factors for more contamination of the environment,” she said.
Sansom and colleagues conducted a prospective multicenter study of environmental contamination associated with C. auris colonization at six ventilator-capable skilled nursing facilities and one acute-care hospital in Illinois and California.
The study showed that among the 41 known C. auris carriers, colonization was detected most frequently on palms/fingertips (76%) and nares (71%), whereas C. auris contamination was detected on 32.2% (66/205) of room surfaces before disinfection and 20.5% (39/190) of room surfaces by 4 hours after disinfection.
The researchers said that they found a higher number of C. auris-colonized body sites was associated with higher odds of environmental contamination at each of the measured time points after disinfection.
“C. auris rapidly contaminates the health care environment near colonized patients, often together with other multidrug-resistant pathogens,” Sansom said. “Our findings highlight the critical need for broadly effective interventions to reduce colonization burden and environmental contamination against multiple pathogens simultaneously.”
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Disclosures:
Sansom reports receiving grants or contracts paid to her institution from the NIH and the Cohn Fellowship Intramural Career Development Grant. Please see the study for all other authors’ relevant financial disclosures.
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