Hygiene

Question

I’m writing an essay on cystic fibrosis. But I need to know more about hygiene. Can you help me ?

Answer

Dear questioner,

Thank you for choosing cystic fibrosis as the subject for your essay.
It is a very important and interesting disease. Although CF is not contagious, hygiene is very important. Respiratory infections are the main problems of CF patients. Especially chronic respiratory infection by the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa leads to a more rapid deterioration of the lung capacity. For that reason one of the goals of the treatment is to avoid chronic infection with this bacterium. Avoiding known sources of infection is very important.
These sources can be other patients and environmental sources, for example devices used in the treatment such as physiotherapy and nebulizer.
Patients infected with Pseudomonas aeruginosa can transfer this bacterium to patients who are not infected. For this reason these two groups of patients should not be in the same place neither in nor outside the hospital.
There are other important aspects of hygiene such as thorough disinfection of all nebulizer equipment to avoid infection. In addition, general measurements to avoid infection are good hand hygiene.
There are some good consensus articles about hygiene and CF, but these mostly concern regulations and recommendations in the hospital setting.
• Lisa Saiman, Jane Siegel, The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Consensus
Conference on Infection Control Participants, Infection control recommendations for patients with cystic fibrosis: Microbiology, important pathogens, and infection control practices to prevent patient-to-patient transmission Am J Infect Control 2003 May;31(3
suppl) S1-62.
•

The topic of CF and hygiene is broad and spreads over many areas. An advice is that you only work out one aspect in your essay.

Kind regards
M. Proesmans

05.10.2010