Here is a scary thought; if you are hospitalized in the U.S. or Europe or you work in a hospital you have an estimated 5-10% chance of developing an infection caused by your hospital stay. Patients are more susceptible to acquiring infection if they happen to be in one of the extremes of life, infancy or old age, or have an impaired immune status, an underlying disease, or suffer from malnutrition. The main infections contracted from the hospital environment are urinary tract infections usually associated with an indwelling bladder catheter, hospital acquired pneumonia, surgical site infections and blood-stream infections. Patients in the hospital seem to be more susceptible to infection than the general population because their defense mechanisms are often impaired during a hospital stay and there is an increasing variety of medical procedures and invasive techniques being performed that can create routes for infections. In addition, the types of germs present in a crowded hospital are frequently more dangerous than those encountered in the community as many are drug-resistant bacteria.

Hospital acquired infection is defined as an infection not incubating at the time of hospital admission, and begins more than 48 hours after admission, thus the patient was admitted to the hospital for some reason other than the infection. Over 1.4 million people in the world suffer from complications associated with hospital acquired infection. Hospital Acquired pneumonia has about 300,000 cases annually, and it carries an associated mortality of 30% to 70%. This percentage is a little high because the people contracting the infection were already very ill and it is estimated that somewhere between 75% and 50% of them may have perished as a result of their original illness and not from the hospital acquired infection.

These are significant cost associated with hospital acquired infections because they cause prolonged stays in the hospital, an additional three to twenty days, which directly cost the patients and insurance companies more. Other costs to be considered are lost work of the infected person, increased prescription use and other diagnostics. Less obvious cost that may be difficult to trace back to the hospital are infections that are transmitted to the community through discharged patients, staff, and visitors. If the transmitted organisms are multi-resistant, they can cause significant disease in the community.

Implementing and maintaining good hygiene practices utilizing antiseptics, disinfectants, and products used for washing and disinfecting will help to reduce the problem. Maintaining and enforcing guidelines for reuse of equipment including sterilization techniques and the reuse of patient materials. As antimicrobial agents become more widely used, bacteria resistant to these will eventually emerge and may spread in the health care setting. Many strains of pneumo-cocci, staphylococci, enterococci, and tuberculosis are now resistant to most or all of the antimicrobials which were once effective. It is also important to control the transportation and disposal of different types of hospital waste to reduce risk of spreading infection.