KEY POINTS:
"Wash your hands" is the message being hammered home to staff, visitors and patients at Auckland Hospital today in the battle to eradicate a potentially fatal bug.
Cleaners yesterday finished cleaning every hard surface in Auckland Hospital after the contagious superbug vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) was found in August.
The bug could be spread by hands which had been in contact with infected surfaces, or contaminated medical equipment.
It was not generally harmful, unless it infected a person's bloodstream, when it could be difficult to treat and sometimes life-threatening.
The bug could survive several days on hard, dry surfaces, such as benches and door handles and yesterday, cleaners using a special cleaning formula which killed the bug, finished wiping down every surface in the hospital.
The bug was not a problem for healthy people and people often carried it in their system without being affected.
However, Auckland District Health Board chief medical officer Dr David Sage said it could cause serious health problems for sick people whose immune systems were low.
Since August 1000 patients had been screened, three were found to be infected with the bug and two of those three had died. However, Dr Sage said it was important to emphasise they had died from other serious illnesses and not as a direct result of VRE.
He said the bug could be spread through urine or faeces and the message to everybody was to take extra care with personal hygiene, including hand washing.
"We are just emphasising a ruthless hand washing regime. Everybody has just got to keep going at it.
"It will stay on a door handle or a surface for a while so we have been top to bottom through the hospital using cleaning agents that have been specific for this bug over the last week. We finished over the weekend.
"It was a huge exercise."
He said the cost of the cleaning and eradication of the bug would be tens of thousands of dollars and the testing regime was also "quite expensive".
All patients admitted to the hospital in the next two to four months will be screened for the bug.
Dr Sage said being a carrier of VRE had no impact on a person's health.
"They will not get ill as a result," he said.
"It essentially is intestinal bacteria that everyone has. The only difference is that it is more resistant to antibiotics."
- NZPA
