For obvious reasons, hospitals are a hotspot for germ exposure, which can increase the risk of infection for those making a visit by up to 10 percent, according to a recent study. What might be surprising though, is that researchers found more bacteria colonization on the hospital elevator buttons than even on the facility’s toilets.
The authors of the study from the University of Toronoto, published in the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine, knew that germs were spread over many surfaces in hospitals, but they wanted to find out specifically how elevator buttons compared to other sources of bacteria exposure (makes sense considering how frequently they are used by everyone – both health workers and patients).
The study looked at 3 large urban teaching hospitals located in Toronto, Ontario.
“We hypothesized that buttons in hospital elevators may be an additional under-recognized site of microbial contamination. At a single university in a community setting, for example, about one-third of elevator buttons were colonized by bacteria. The corresponding frequency of colonization in hospitals has not been described. If present, such colonization creates the potential for pathogen transmission, given the ubiquity of elevators in large hospitals, the necessity of using the buttons to operate the elevator, and repeated contacts by diverse individuals.”
In the end, they found that elevator buttons did in fact have more bacteria than toilets. Prevalence of colonization on elevator buttons was 61 percent and 43 percent on the toilet surfaces.
The authors said that some options to decrease this exposure include alcohol-based sanitizers or even making elevator buttons bigger so that people can press them with their elbows.
I say, maybe (as long as you’re not super sick) taking the stairs could be a better option for more than just this reason.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
