Preventing infections in hospitals
MANILA, Philippines - Hospital-acquired infections have a broad range of effects on patients’ health, leading to disease complications and significantly increasing risks, functional disability, emotional stress, and total healthcare costs.
“Every day at work and in our homes, we are exposed to countless microorganisms that can affect our own health and our business,“ says Erick Africa, Unilab’s Infection Control category head. “Disinfectants like chlorine bleach are employed, even though they have been shown to be toxic and harmful to us and the environment.”
Hospitals and other healthcare facilities need to establish standard infection-control programs that include strict protocols for disinfection, especially in facilities with limited resources that often have no recourse but to reprocess instruments that may in ideal situations be disposable, such as certain surgical instruments and ventilator tubes.
Such protocols require the use of an appropriate, safe, and effective disinfectant. Recent studies conducted locally have found a newly released combination of hydrogen peroxide and elemental silver (H2O2 and Ag+, Sanosil, Unilab) to be an effective option. In one study conducted at the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, the disinfectant resulted in a 100-percent reduction in microbial growth, an effect that was observed to last more than 20 days after disinfection.
Unilab has called Sanosil, a “responsible disinfectant,” having been proven effective against gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria, viruses including bacteriophages, spore-forming organisms, yeast, fungi, mold, and protozoa, while being nontoxic and eco-friendly. It can be used to treat water as well as clean operating rooms, ventilation systems, wheelchairs, ambulances, and just about anything that needs to be thoroughly disinfected. It is even safe for use at home.
