Skin creams can transmit deadly bugs
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Thursday Jan 31 2008
COSMETIC products such as moisturisers and body lotions can transmit deadly bugs to critically ill hospital patients, a study has shown.
The warning comes after five intensive care patients in a Spanish hospital contracted a life-threatening infection. Doctors traced the outbreak at the Universitari del Mar Hospital in Barcelona to a moisturising body milk used in the patients' care.
Containers of the product had been contaminated with a bug called Burkholderia cepacia before they were opened. The bacteria belong to a family of microbes commonly found in soil and water.
They are known to cause hospital infections, and while posing little risk to healthy people can be dangerous to patients with weak immune systems or lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis. Researchers reporting on the case in the journal Critical Care said the moisturiser had probably been contaminated during its manufacture, storage or transport. This was confirmed by tests which identified the bacteria in sealed containers.
The authors, led by Dr Francisco Alvarez-Lerma from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, wrote: “Moisturising body milk is a potential source of infection. In severely ill patients, the presence of bacteria in cosmetic products, even within accepted limits, may lead to severe life-threatening infections.''
They made a “strong recommendation'' not to use cosmetic products on patients which could not be guaranteed as sterile.
Under European Union rules, skin care products – including those used in hospitals – are not required to be sterile, although there are limits to the amount and type of bacteria they can carry.
The five infected patients had all been admitted to an 18-bed intensive care unit. Three suffered blood poisoning, and two others acquired lung and urinary tract infections.
B. cepacia was isolated from three samples of the moisturising body milk that had been applied to the patients' skin.
