Dangerous new superbugs taking over hospital sinks

So you’re at the doctor because you’ve caught this year’s “whatever” flu. Your doctor puts on their rubber gloves, takes out his thermometer, has a look at this, a look at that. Then he sticks his fingers in your mouth… or worse! Then he states “yup, you’ve got the funk, time for some antibiotics”. Then you are instructed to wash up the drool on your face in the nice little sink in their office. You wash up, get your meds, and go home to live in hell until the antibiotics do their thing. Sounds like no biggie right? Wrong! What site do you think this is?

So here’s what’s happening. You with the flu, the guy before you with the who knows what on his face, the sneezing kid before him with the snot fountain for a nose are all using that little sink as well as all the sinks in the hospital as they please. All of you are dumping microscopic bacteria down the sink that ends up trapped in the elbow of the drain. Nice right? All your germs mixed together in a sort of bacterial ooze. So this ooze just grows in there at the rate of about an inch a day. Yeah, you just did the math right? Couple days, a week maybe and that bacteria has reached the top and everyone using the sink is now spreading the strongest of that bacteria that survived all over the sink, the counter, their hands, etc. Fun times right?

This happens probably everywhere but let’s stick with the hospitals for now since they are such fun factories for germs of all types. It’s only fair anyway as the phenomenon was first discovered when patients started dying from infections with multidrug resistant bacteria that were confined to hospital rooms. They didn’t bring the bugs with them, they contracted them in the hospital via the methods mentioned previously. A particularly disturbing superbug resistant to carbapenem (an important antibiotic) has been appearing in sinks and plumbing systems of hospitals worldwide according to multiple papers published since 2010.

Since the majority of the world’s hospitals are in dire straits and lack the facilities to deal with these superbugs this problem will continue to grow globally and potentially exponentially. Doctors are rushing to study how the bacteria are spreading but the bacteria are winning the battle here.

So what to do?

What to do indeed.

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