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Nosocomial Transmission of Opportunistic Infections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Julie Louise Gerberding
Julie Louise Gerberding*
Affiliation:
San Francisco General Hospital, San Francisco, California
*
San Francisco General Hospital, 1001 Potrero Ave, Bldg 1, Rm 301, San Francisco, CA 94110
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Abstract

Immunocompromised patients are at high risk for opportunistic infections. Traditionally, these infections were thought to arise from endogenous reactivation of previously acquired latent infections, and nosocomial transmission therefore was deemed to be so unlikely that no special infection control interventions were needed to prevent transmission in healthcare settings. However, new data have challenged this view and suggest that some opportunistic pathogens are transmissible from one immunosuppressed patient to another. Epidemiological investigations, molecular genotyping, animal studies, and air-sampling experiments lend support to the hypothesis that reinfection with opportunistic pathogens does occur, that airborne transmission is possible, and that nosocomial spread is a plausible explanation for case clusters. Taken together, these observations support the view that some opportunistic infections are exogenous in origin and that additional epidemiological investigations are needed to define the true risk of nosocomial spread and need for isolation.

Type
From the Fifth International Conference on the Prevention of Infection
Information
Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology , Volume 19 , Issue 8 , August 1998 , pp. 574 - 577
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America 1998

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