sciencehospitalsare usually seen as places where lives are saved But going to a hospital does have its risk each year three million people catch nosocomial illnesses and fifty thousand died from them Nosocomial comes from the Greek nosocomio which means hospital infections are considered nosocomial if they first appear forty-eight hours or more after hospital admission or within thirty days of discharge To combat this problem hospitals are testing several techniques both new and old here at Birmingham Hospital a test ward has been equipped with copper from door handles to dinner trays Copper is said to reduce the risk of infection The antimicrobial activity of copper has been known from the barratry ward So by the simple application of copper with an array we have got the propensity of added protection for our patients For over a year and a half researchers have been analyzing the presence of microbes in this test ward compared with a traditional ward So this is a swab that would have been taken from one of the surfaces in a hospital ward Doctor Casey takes samples from the copper equipped test ward and others taken in a standard war They are then put into petri dishes used to grow the bacteria which are placed inside a drying kiln After twenty-four hours the result is unequivocal in the copper equipped ward ninety-nine percent of the bacteria has disappeared that’s not the case in the other ward From piping to door handles it’s believed copper could help considerably reduce the risk of infections Now we think that the copper generates very small amounts of a poisonous molecule called hydrogen peroxide and that hydrogen peroxide will start to kill the organisms on the surface and it will take ten to thirty minutes to kill them In belgium researchers are looking into another type of metal silver here at the AGC glass Europe Research Center in germania cha la they have developed a special kind of glass containing silver ions to fight the spread of bacteria Silver is well known for its antimicrobial action for example back in Roman times already officers who ate out of silver ware fell ill far less often than their soldiers A simple test shows how efficient the technique is here bacteria is placed on a piece of glass containing silver and here on another regular piece of glass After twenty-four hours the samples are removed In the sample placed on the ion infused glass there are hardly any bacteria left whereas the bacteria is still highly present on the regular glass This special antibacterial glass is now being used in several hospitals The waiting room has already been equipped with antibacterial windows and we plan to do that more and more in at risk zones or in intensive care wards where there are large glass surfaces Some hospitals regularly carry out checks to find out if there are any patients with antibiotic resistant bacteria that could cause nosocomial infections The use of new materials is a big step forward in the fight against hospital acquired diseases But it doesn’t replace simple basic hygiene bacteria is first and foremost transmitted through unclean hands
