Microbial Community Profiling in Intensive Care Units Expose Limitations in Current Sanitary Standards

Frontiers in Public Health

article

Lucas Ferreira Ribeiro¹  Erica M. Lopes²  Luciano T. Kishi³  Liliane Fraga Costa Ribeiro⁴  Mayra Gonçalves Menegueti⁵  Gilberto Gambero Gaspar⁵  Rafael Silva-Rocha²  María-Eugenia Guazzaroni¹ 

[1] Department of Biology, FFCLRP -University of São Paulo;Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology, FMRP -University of São Paulo;National Laboratory of Scientific Computing;Department of Biochemistry and Immunology, FMRP -University of São Paulo;The Medical School Clinics Hospital, University of São Paulo

关键词: ICU cleaning;    intensive care unit;    healthcare-associated infections;    NICU biomarkers;    cross-contamination;    polyhexamethylene biguanide;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpubh.2019.00240

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Hospital-associated infections (HAIs) are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in intensive care units (ICUs) and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Organisms causing these infections are often present on surfaces around the patient. Given that microbiota may vary across different ICUs, the HAI-related microbial signatures within these units remain underexplored. In this study, we use deep-sequencing analyses to explore and compare the structure of bacterial communities at inanimate surfaces of the ICU and NICU wards of The Medical School Clinics Hospital (Brazil). The data revealed that NICU presents higher biodiversity than ICU and surfaces closest to the patient showed a peculiar microbiota, distinguishing one unit from the other. Several facultative anaerobes or obligate anaerobes HAI-related genera were classified as biomarkers for the NICU, whereas Pseudomonas was the main biomarker for ICU. Correlation analyses revealed a distinct pattern of microbe-microbe interactions for each unit, including bacteria able to form multi-genera biofilms. Furthermore, we evaluated the effect of concurrent cleaning over the ICU bacterial community. The results showed that, although some bacterial populations decreased after cleaning, various HAI-related genera were quite stable following sanitization, suggesting being well-adapted to the ICU environment. Overall, these results enabled identification of discrete ICU and NICU reservoirs of potentially pathogenic bacteria and provided evidence for the presence of a set of biomarkers genera that distinguish these units. Moreover, the study exposed the inconsistencies of the routine cleaning to minimize HAI-related genera contamination.

【 授权许可】

CC BY