Yet, all is not bleak in the fight against superbugs!
While COVID-19 has suppressed antimicrobial research, the pandemic also has sparked awareness of airborne pathogens.
Hospitals now know: It’s not just door handles, bed rails, and scalpels that can be teeming with lethal microbes. The air we all share — in the emergency department, the operating theatre, the ICU — may be contaminated, too.
Of course, airborne superbugs have long been implicated in the transmission of hospital-acquired infection. As Iranian scientists observed well before the pandemic, “Antibiotic-resistant airborne bacteria can survive in the various hospital environments and remain suspended in the air for long periods of time.”
In fact, airborne superbugs posed such a danger that these scientists urged hospitals to deploy stand-alone air cleaning devices: “Use of advanced air purification and ventilation equipment, their constant monitoring, as well as a continuous microbial sampling of the hospital air are strongly recommended for preventing nosocomial infection.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened the case, prompting hospitals worldwide to install air disinfection technology, such as NanoStrike™ Technology by Novaerus.
After all, the same devices that remove SARS-CoV aerosols also inactivate airborne superbugs.
MRSA, C. difficile, Acinetobacter species, and tuberculosis are among the bacteria shown by independent testing to be obliterated by Novaerus’ ultra-low energy NanoStrike Technology. Common viruses such as influenza and norovirus are removed by the same process.
NanoStrike Technology harnesses a range of physical concurrent pathogen inactivation processes to safely disinfect the air. NanoStrike coils provide a powerful strike that works to burst airborne pathogen cells, rapidly inactivating them, ensuring they are no longer a threat of infection.
Mounted above ICU beds, or wheeled into operating theatres, installed in wards and emergency rooms, Novaerus units safely operate 24/7 proximity to even the most vulnerable patients and protect medical staff as well.
It’s clear that both antibiotic stewardship and infection prevention are critical to slowing the rise of antibiotic resistance. Some experts argue that of the two approaches, infection prevention is the more urgent.
“Antimicrobial resistance is affected by many factors, but too much of our focus has been on antimicrobial usage,” two Australian physicians have asserted in JAC-Antimicrobial Resistance. “The major factor that drives resistance rates globally is spread.”
The countries most burdened by antimicrobial resistance, these doctors note, are those in which pathogen spread, rather than antibiotic overuse, is the dominant factor.
One of the most effective, most accessible, and least expensive, weapons against transmission is air disinfection.
Right now, all attention is focused on taming COVID-19, but the world cannot wait for the pandemic to subside before tackling the rise of superbugs. As a Harvard University scientist notes, “The antibiotic resistance crisis will continue well beyond the resolution of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
READ PART 1 of COVID-19 Amplified the Superbug Crisis. Hospitals Must Respond.
