How are staph infections spread in hospitals?
I would say that 85 percent of the time it’s on the hands of healthcare professionals. So it’s patient to patient, but on the hands of healthcare workers. Q: What are the symptoms? A: It depends on the site of infection. If you have a patient who had surgery, about four days after the surgery, the area around the incision will turn red, you’ll probably see puss and the patient usually gets a fever. On the other hand, if you have a patient in the critical care unit on a respirator, they can get extremely short of breath and just feel really, really horrible. Q: Is it deadly? A: If it’s in a wound, most of the time a patient will survive. But if it’s in the lung or the blood, I would say approximately 25 percent of patients will die within the next month. Now, these patients are also usually in a weakened condition from some other medical problem, and some die as a result of the underlying problem, not the staph infection. But at least half are directly due to the infection. Q: Some expe
