One the one hand this story represents an important set of findings: Hospital Rooms Can Be Bacteria Reservoirs : Personal Liberty Digestâ„¢. Main point: Hospital rooms are not getting to be germ free after cleaning. And in this case they focused on rooms where the recently discharged patient had a history of infection with multidrug resistant Acientobacter baumanii. It is an unpleasant bug. And so they apparently try to give extra attention to these rooms to get them super clean.
Alas, this study shows that the rooms do not in fact get exceptionally clean after such special treatment. So if you want to decontaminate a room it certainly seems like a good idea to check to see if your decontamination methods work.
But a separate question not addressed in this study is what happens to the rest of the microbes in the room after such cleaning. Trying to turn a hospital room into a sterile environment has the potential to also clear out microbes that could in some way help limit the spread of MDR A. baumanii. Possibly far fetched I know but this certainly seems like a good case for studying the whole microbial ecology of hopistal rooms and not focusing on single species.
