Background
Hospital cleaning practices are critical to the prevention of nosocomial infection
transmission. To this end, cloth towels soaked in disinfectants are commonly used
to clean and disinfect hospital surfaces. Cloth cleaning towels have been linked to
an outbreak of Bacillus cereus and have been shown to reduce the effectiveness of commonly used quaternary ammonium
disinfectants. Thus, it is important to determine whether the reuse of cloth towels
increases the risk of pathogen transmission in hospitals.
Methods
The goal of this project was to determine the effects of laundry and cleaning practices
commonly used in hospitals for washing, storage, and disinfection of cloth cleaning
towels on their microbial loads.
Results
Our results indicate that cloth towels used for cleaning hospital rooms contained
high numbers of microbial contaminants.
Conclusions
In this case, hospital laundering practices appear insufficient to remove microbial
contaminants and may even add contaminants to the towels. Furthermore, it has been
previously reported that towels can interfere with the action of common hospital disinfectants.
Either independently or in combination, these 2 factors may increase the risk for
transmission of pathogens in hospitals. These observations indicate the need to critically
reevaluate current hospital cleaning practices associated with reuse of cloth towels.
Key Words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 25, 2013
Footnotes
Conflict of interest: None to report.
Identification
Copyright
© 2013 Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
