Influence of sanitizing methods on healthcare associated infections: comparison between traditional and innovative probiotic-based approaches

Healthcare associated infections (HAIs) are a huge global healthcare problem and the importance of hospital surfaces as a source of microbial contamination has been long been recognised. It is also of global concern that the prevention and treatment of HAIs is complicated by the pathogens frequently causing these HAIs are resistant to a wide range of antimicrobials and disinfectants. Good sanitation practices can limit and control microbial contamination, however, decontamination of hospital surfaces traditional cleaning methods is short term in nature; it is not long before contamination occurs again. This had led to the development of new approaches to solve this issue, Recently, innovative detergents containing non-pathogenic (not disease causing) probiotics (Probiotic Cleaning Hygiene System, PCHS) were shown to reduce the number of pathogens by 70-90% more than conventional disinfectants in several hospitals. This is due to them being able to compete with replace the disease causing pathogens due to a principle called competitive antagonism. They also reduced the number of drug-resistance genes present in the pathogens, leading to a drop in the number of the drug resistant pathogens themselves. Furthermore, the Bacillus species contained in the detergents (the probiotics) are genetically stable even after four years of continuous use and contact with surface pathogens, which means that they are safe to use for sanitizing purposes. Based on these observations, this study is looking at how a PCHS probiotic-based sanitizing intervention (treatment) may affect the number of how many HAIs rates when used in hospitals.